


sucker punch

by theantepenultimateriddle



Series: hit or miss [1]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: 15 times while writing chapter 1, Also I want to point out that I listened to 'I don't do boys' by Electra like, Death, F/F, I guess it's not technically noir but it sure is fun, Torture, and probably more later - Freeform, it's first person because that's The Style (TM), minkowski's kinda fucked up, minkowski's really fucked up who am i kidding, minlace spy noir!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-01-20 13:07:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 30,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12433509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theantepenultimateriddle/pseuds/theantepenultimateriddle
Summary: When I was about twenty feet away she bid the man a quick goodbye and met me in the middle, snagging two canapés off a passing waiter’s tray. She offered one to me, and I took it gingerly, but didn’t bite in. I’ve seen too many people go out frothing out the mouth from cyanide to trust any food that wasn’t made by my own two hands. My fingers brushed against her palm, and a tingle ran up my arm like I had been shocked with a live wire.Lovelace presented me with her other hand, and I shook. Her hand was warm but not sweaty, her skin soft. “Captain Isabel Lovelace, and you are?”“Renee Minkowski. Pleased to meet you.”





	1. Chapter 1

She was the kind of girl you’d see and immediately recognize as out of your league. She was tall, statuesque, poised. She slipped through the crowd like a snake through grass, laughing at the tepid jokes of CEOs and old money, a glass of bubbly held daintily in her hand. You could be forgiven for missing the scars on her knuckles, the chip in her right incisor, the way she limped slightly from a badly-healed shattered knee. You could be almost forgiven for missing the bulge of the gun under her suit jacket, but by then you’d most likely already be dead. 

_ Captain Isabel Lovelace,  _ they’d told me.  _ We took her out once, but we weren’t thorough enough. Get it done this time, and well. We’re counting on you, Lieutenant. Make Goddard proud. _

Goddard can go fuck themselves. I just want to live to payday.

She spotted me and gave me a smile like a searchlight, bright and shining and leaving no space to hide, then gestured for me to come over and talk to her. A bright flush rose to my cheeks, and I set down my glass of champagne on the bar and stood up, cracking my neck. Barstools wreck my spine, but I need to maintain appearances, and sitting on the floor would have done nothing but stain the damn dress I was forced into and make a load of New York’s mucketiest of mucks look at me like I had personally smeared dog shit on their shoes. Not to say I wasn’t tempted to do it anyways. But at these gatherings you have to seem either inconspicuous or competent. I was going for competent. 

I brushed off my lap and made a beeline over to her. No sense in pretending I hadn’t seen; Isabel Lovelace seemed, from what I had observed, to be the kind of gal you didn’t just ignore. Nevertheless, as I wove around the sparkling women and men with their plasticine smiles, my stomach clenched. I felt my thigh holster scrape slightly against the fabric of my dress and swallowed hard.

She wasn’t the kind of gal you let your guard down around, either.

She was chatting up a man I recognized to be a big-time business personality as I approached, keeping a casual eye on me. When I was about twenty feet away she bid the man a quick goodbye and met me in the middle, snagging two canapés off a passing waiter’s tray. She offered one to me, and I took it gingerly, but didn’t bite in. I’ve seen too many people go out frothing out the mouth from cyanide to trust any food that wasn’t made by my own two hands. My fingers brushed against her palm, and a tingle ran up my arm like I had been shocked with a live wire.

Lovelace presented me with her other hand, and I shook. Her hand was warm but not sweaty, her skin soft. “Captain Isabel Lovelace, and you are?”

“Renee Minkowski. Pleased to meet you.” I withdrew and stood awkwardly as she raised an eyebrow.

“The pleasure is all mine, Ms. Minkowski.” I winced, but didn't correct her on the title. The less she knew about me, the better. But she noticed anyways, and the look on her face told me she wasn’t going to let it go. “Did I mispronounce it? Or would you prefer something other than Ms.?”

I hesitated for a moment, then sighed. Time for a white lie. “Just Minkowski is fine. I’m not one for titles.”

She nodded. “Well, just Minkowski, what brings you to party with these oh so interesting high society jackasses?” 

Lovelace’s voice was wry, and I snorted, then shook my head. “You’re awfully dismissive. How can you be so sure that I’m not one of these jackasses, Captain?” 

“Oh, I had a feeling. You seem more… serious.” She tilted her head and looked me up and down slowly, and I felt a shiver run down my spine, settling in my gut. “If I had to guess,” she said, “I’d say military of some kind. Army? Navy?”

I was impressed against my will. “Air Force. How could you tell?” 

“Other than you asking me to call you by your last name? Simple.” She lowered her voice ever so slightly and leaned in, close enough for me to smell the faint lavender scent of her perfume. “I’ve never met a civilian with a posture like yours. That, the clear nail polish, your hairstyle, the gun strapped to your thigh. All clear giveaways.” 

Icy fear spread through my body, freezing me in place, but I did my best to keep my face neutral. “You mean like the one under your jacket, Captain?”

Lovelace gave me a smile, and I noticed against my will how white her teeth were, how her face seemed to light up. “You never know when there might be trouble.” 

“Oh? And am I going to have trouble with you?” I kept my eyes on hers, looking straight into their dark depths. 

She shook her head. “Not here, at least. Unlike who I suspect your bosses are, I don’t have a fetish for collateral damage. If we’re going for a confrontation, let’s do it properly.” Lovelace moved in even closer, putting her face next to mine, her lips just barely brushing my ear. “Meet me on the roof in twenty. Bring the gun or don’t, I don’t care.” She withdrew and looked me in the eye. “I think I like you more than the others, Minkowski. I think that maybe, just maybe,  you’ll be the first person to actually listen.” Then she turned and melted seamlessly back into the crowd, leaving me with a sour taste in my mouth, an appetizer in my hand, the promise of a meeting, and the desire to be far, far more drunk than I currently was. 

_ The roof in twenty. Bring the gun or don’t. _

I preferred to keep the gun, thank you very much.


	2. Chapter 2

The roof of the venue was twenty stories off the ground, but I’m not scared of heights. I am, however, only human, and the wind whipping around the building was flapping my dress around and sneaking cold fingers across my skin, raising goosebumps on my arms. I couldn’t help but shiver. Damn Lovelace for picking this place. Damn her and her flair for dramatics and her low, persuasive voice. Damn me, for being a sucker for a pretty face and and a sharp mind.

I looked around fast, then reached down and hiked my skirt up, pulling out my gun from the thigh holster it was in. The grip was freezing against my hand, but I clutched it tight and straightened up, glancing around the roof. Nothing. I stood there for five more minutes in the cold with my gun held tight, until my head started to hurt from straining my eyes to look in the darkness. _Lovelace, where the fuck are you?_

As if answering the call of my thoughts, I heard footsteps from the shadows behind me, getting closer. I whirled around and snapped my arms up, raising the gun and pointing it into the murk. “Who’s there?”

A laugh, and Lovelace stepped out of the shadows and into the moonlight. “Relax, Minkowski. It’s just me.” She wasn’t wearing her suit jacket anymore, and her shoulder holster was on display against the crisp white of her shirt. Her sleeves were rolled up past her elbows, her tie gone. It wasn’t a casual look. It was a functional one. Less things to grab, less layers between her and her weapon. No tie, no pre-knotted noose around her neck. Lovelace had come, if not thirsting for a fight, then at very least ready for one. She met my eyes, and the headache that I’d been having intensified.

Suddenly I wished I had argued a little harder when the bosses put me in a skirt. It’s hard to kick ass with yards of loose fabric tangled around your legs.

I didn’t lower my gun, just twisted it slightly to the side, aiming a little to her left. If I had to shoot her, I didn’t want to do it by accident. “Well, think of the devil.”

“You were thinking of me? How sweet.” She tilted her head to the left a little and smiled, and against my will I noticed the set of her lips, how soft they looked. _Dammit, Minkowski, focus._

I cleared my throat, trying to think past my discomfort and the distraction of Lovelace’s face. “Who else would I be thinking of? It’s not like anyone else challenged me to a rooftop duel.”

“Oh, this isn’t a duel,” Lovelace said. “Or, at least, I hope it isn’t. I was thinking of it as more of a… conversation. That is, if you’re willing to put down the gun and talk.”

“What do we have to talk about? I’ve been contracted to kill you, Captain. And besides,” I said, jerking my head towards her holstered pistol and immediately regretting it, “you’re not exactly unarmed yourself. I don’t know how fast you can draw that thing, but I’m guessing it’s almost faster than I can blink. If you’ll forgive me, I’d rather not be outgunned right now.”

Lovelace stared at me, her eyes glinting silver in the dim light. The strong planes of her face were illuminated, making them harsher, the angles sharper. For a split second I looked at her and saw what the ancients must have seen in their gods. Then a cloud moved over the moon, and she became just another silhouette on a dark night. “Fine, then.”

She raised her hand to her gun, and I jerked my barrel back towards her, aiming at her center of mass. Lovelace didn’t even falter. She just pulled out the handgun and, with almost languid movements, dropped it to the floor. The metal clattered when it hit the cement of the roof, and I flinched at the noise.

Lovelace’s face was cast in shadow, but I nevertheless got the impression of her eyes looking out at me with an intent I didn’t understand. “Happy now?” she asked, her voice level and slightly husky, appealing in a way I couldn’t quite describe. I didn’t answer, and she sighed. “Minkowski, either shoot me or put the gun down.”

“Why should I trust you?” I looked at her, trying to judge where her eyes were in the gloom. “Why should I listen to anything you say?”

Lovelace took a step forwards, and through a gap in the clouds bands of starlight shone down again, striping her skin. “What did Goddard say about me?” She took another step, and I cocked my gun slowly.

“Don’t move again, Lovelace.”

“I’m not scared to die anymore, Minkowski. I haven’t been for a long while.” She moved forwards again, her polished shoes tapping quietly on the rooftop. “Goddard sent you. I know they did. What lies did they tell you? Why are you working with them?” Lovelace sounded frustrated now, her words hardening into a diamond edge. My head throbbed in time to her speech, the world seeming to pulse.

The wind started to pick up even more, and the wild curls of Lovelace’s hair stirred around her face as she spoke. It gave her an almost monstrous appearance; Medusa with her head of snakes and gaze of stone, a gorgon standing in front of me with her stare fixing me in place. I shivered, but not because of the frigid air.

All the while, Lovelace kept moving, coming closer with every second. What had started out as thirty feet closely shortened to twenty, then fifteen. I clenched the gun tighter, my knuckles whitening. “You don’t know me, Lovelace,” I said, through gritted teeth. A sudden spike of pain drove itself through my eyes, and the world blurred slightly, even as I kept my sights on her. “I’m not some pure, good person. I’m not a damsel for you to save from Goddard.” I swallowed hard. “I’ve shot and I’ve killed before, and I can do it again.”

She stopped for a moment, looking at me. She wasn’t more than ten feet away now, close enough for me to see the whites of her eyes. When she spoke, her voice was slow and measured. “But will you?”

In that moment, I hated Lovelace. I hated her for her voice, I hated her for her face. I hated how capable she was. I hated how, despite myself, despite all of this, I liked her.

I hated that she was trying to call my bluff.

Lovelace was seven feet away. Then five. She was almost within arm’s reach, and my head was spinning like a carousel, stabbing with pain. My entire body was shaking so hard I could barely keep my hands steady, holding my gun like it was a life preserver keeping me afloat. _Do something, Lieutenant! Either lower the fucking gun, or-_

My finger tightened almost involuntarily, and I pulled the trigger.

The gun went off with a _bang_ , but my hands had betrayed me by trembling and I missed, the bullet spinning past on Lovelace’s right into the darkness. Before I could try again she lunged the last few feet towards me and grabbed my gun arm, hard. She twisted, forcing the weapon out of my hand and me to my knees with my shoulder locked in pain. Just as quickly as she had grabbed me, though, Lovelace let go and picked my pistol up off the floor. In one smooth motion, she pivoted and hurled it over the edge of the building. I didn’t hear it hit the ground.

Lovelace turned back to me, looking at me as I sat on the hard ground in a daze. Alarm bells were clanging in my mind, telling me I should be running, but the world had gone a little hazy around the edges, pulsing gently. I couldn’t quite seem to focus on anything but Lovelace in front of me, in her crisp white shirt and black pants, holding her hand out to help me up.

God help me, I took it.

She hauled me to my feet with surprising ease, pulling me up and steadying me with her other hand. I expected her to let go, but she didn’t, just held me gently. I got the feeling that if I wanted to, I could pull away and leave, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. I looked Lovelace in her smoked-glass eyes and she looked back, and suddenly she didn’t seem like the suave, dangerous rogue agent I had been told she was. She just looked like a woman.

Lovelace looked back at me for a moment, and then her gaze flickered down to my mouth and my breath caught in my throat. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would jump out of my chest. For a second, I felt like a teenager with her first crush, taken back to the days when I didn’t know how bad the pain could get. I tried to remember how I had tried to shoot her, how she was supposed to be dead, but all I could feel was her name on my lips, being dragged from my mouth into the cold night air. “Lovelace…”

“Don’t,” she said, her voice low and just slightly rough. She shook her head. “It’s not your fault.” Then she leaned down and kissed me, and conscious thought shattered like a wineglass hitting the floor.

Her mouth against mine was so warm, her lips just slightly chapped. I didn’t think, just moved on instinct, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her closer to me until our bodies were flush against each other. Lovelace moved her hands down to rest on my hips, and a noise came involuntarily from my throat, almost a whimper. I leaned in further and tasted champagne on her lips, and something broke behind my eyes, turning the world into pain.

I gasped and let go of Lovelace, stumbling backwards and clutching my hands to the sides of my head. The pain was all-encompassing, surrounding me on every side. It felt like the inside of my skull was full of gunpowder and someone had just lit a match. Lovelace reached out to me, but I couldn’t touch her, couldn't even look at her. The confusion of the world was too much for me, pounding at my temples, so I did the only thing I could.

I turned and ran.


	3. Chapter 3

Cutter steepled his fingers and looked at me over them with a wide, unnerving smile. Through the perfect white of his teeth, he spoke in sugared tones. “Renee, hello! Rachel has told me you bring news of your tête-à-tête with our dear Isabel last night. Tell me, where did you dispose of her body?”

I swallowed hard, avoiding his eyes. Cutter always looked at you like he was figuring out if selling your organs on the black market would be more valuable than keeping you alive and kicking, and I didn’t need that sort of stare right then. Especially not because--

_ \--Lovelace’s mouth on mine, lips and hands and her body pressed against me-- _

\--of the events of last night. I clenched my fists, digging my nails into the palms of my hands, and pushed all thoughts of kissing Lovelace out of my mind. Then I took a deep breath. “Sir, Captain Lovelace was able to get away. I misjudged her skills-”

Cutter cut me off. “Oh,  _ did _ you now? You know, I do believe we informed you of her considerable abilities. Renee, Renee, Renee, I am disappointed in you.” He shook his head slowly, but his smile only grew wider. 

My stomach clenched in fear. When Cutter smiled like that, you knew something bad was going to happen; good things never earned his mirth. I just prayed he wouldn’t fire me, because in this business there’s no cleaning out your office and moving on. You leave in a pine box or you don’t leave at all. 

Cutter continued speaking. “Why don’t you tell me how she managed to get away from you? I mean, you’re more than an intellectual match for her. And Isabel has such a tendency to be impulsive and reckless, I’d have been sure you’d catch her in a mistake. Except that didn’t happen, did it? I’d like to know where things went wrong.”

I took a deep breath and finally worked up the nerve to look the boss in the face, if not in the eyes. Cutter has eyes that can read your soul, and I sure as fuck didn’t want him opening the book of mine. So instead I stared at his forehead. “Captain Lovelace was aware that a Goddard agent was going to be sent to the party and was able to plan in accordance with that. She was able to disarm me and get away.  I…  _ suspect _ that at some point she slipped something into my food.”  _ That wouldn’t totally explain the headache though, would it? It wouldn’t explain how it went away after you ran from her, Minkowski.  _ I kept my eyes fixed on his slicked-back hairline and tried not to blink.

“Hmmm. Well then,” Cutter said. “You know, Renee, I  _ thought _ that you knew better than to eat anything at a party, for exactly this reason.”

“I do, sir, and-” I shut myself up before I could finish the sentence. Letting Cutter know any more than he had to about the last night’s events would be a mistake I wouldn’t have a lot of time to regret. 

“And?” Cutter said. “And what?” There was silence for a beat as I said nothing. Then he leaned back in his chair and nodded. “As far as I see it, this might even be a good thing. Because you know, Isabel is a lot of things--hasty to act, revenge-driven, angry-- but she’s not overly sentimental. If she wanted you dead, well, you’d be dead! Yet… here you stand. There must be a reason. The question is, what is it? For us to figure that out, you have to be alive, of course!”

A flood of relief coursed through my body at that, but it quickly dissipated. “Alive”, at Goddard, was more of a spectrum than a clean-cut definition. I cleared my throat. “I… understand that, sir. What would you like me to do?”

Cutter hummed under his breath. “Renee, I think it would be in the best interests of the company if you typed up your report on one of our computers and then went home until we can gather intel on her next whereabouts. Report back here at, say, 8:00 sharp tomorrow morning. Don’t be late!” He paused. “And do remember to pick up a replacement gun in the armory. We can’t have you heading out again unarmed, can we?”

“Of course not, sir.”

* * *

I went home at 6 pm, three hours after I finished staring into a computer screen, typing and re-typing Cutter’s report. My apartment isn’t in the good part of town. This wasn’t out of financial need; Goddard may not be the most straight-up employer, but damn if it doesn’t pay well. I had more than enough money to buy an apartment wherever I wanted. But sometimes my work comes to me rather than the other way around, and it’s easier to pay for damages when no one will care if some of them aren’t fixed. My apartment has some bullet holes in the walls, some scorch marks on the door, a few bloodstains in places I might not have been able to reach to clean off. It’s pretty beat up, but dammit, it’s mine. I like going back there at the end of the day. It gives me a place to relax, and I needed some time to relax.

I parked my car and trudged up two flights of stairs to my apartment, fumbling with my keys to find the right one. I unlocked my front door and stepped into my darkened living room, shutting the door behind me. Then I slumped back against the wood of the door and sighed. “What a fucking day.”

“Something wrong, Minkowski?” The voice came from the shadows on the couch, making my muscles spasm in surprise, and I grabbed for my gun instinctively. My hand was met with an empty holster, and I cursed. I’d left it in the car like a goddamn newbie.  _ Idiot, Lieutenant! _ I braced myself for a burst of lead to the stomach, but the bullet I was expecting didn’t come. Instead there was a laugh and a  _ click _ as whoever it was reached over and turned on the lamp, brightening the room with yellow light and making the shadows shrink away. And there was Lovelace, sitting on my sofa, leaning back into the cushions like she had never been more at home. 

My frantically beating heart began to slow, and I braced myself on the wall next to the door as the adrenaline drained from my system. When I felt like I could move without having a heart attack, I looked up at her. “Captain Lovelace, what the ever-loving  _ hell  _ are you doing in my home?” I said, through gritted teeth.

Lovelace’s eyes widened just slightly, but the look of surprise on her face passed so fast I didn’t know if I had imagined it. She sat forwards, crossing her legs. She was wearing somewhat casual clothes today, nothing like the suit from last night, just a button-up red plaid shirt, a black leather jacket, and jeans. She looked younger than I knew she was in those clothes, almost like a college student on her way to a class. And, dammit, she looked good. I didn’t think there was a single universe where Lovelace didn’t look good. 

Lovelace started to speak, and I snapped my mind back to the present to listen to her. “I was here to see you,  _ Lieutenant Minkowski _ . I’d have thought that would be obvious.” She patted the couch next to her. “Sit. We need to talk.” 

I raised an eyebrow at her, tilting my head slightly. “How do I know you're unarmed?”

She looked hurt at that, and I almost regretted it. “Minkowski, do I seem like I want to kill you? Think about me. Think about everything I’ve done. Think about all the opportunities I’ve had to kill you, and reflect on how, despite  _ all _ of that, you’re still alive. Now ask yourself: even if I am armed, does it really pose a threat to your safety?” 

Lovelace had a point. I flashed back to what Cutter said about her wanting me alive, to what she said about me listening to her and getting out of Goddard. To how she’d kissed me, like I was important, like she thought I was worth trying to get through to. But…  _ Isabel Lovelace is a lot of things, but she’s not sentimental. _ Cutter was right-- by the reports, she’d killed at least five Goddard agents, including some of our best. Far be it from me to trust the bosses, but Lovelace was smart. More than that, she was cunning. And I wouldn’t put it past her to fuck with my mind like this. So I shook my head. “I don’t trust like that. Whatever weapons you have, take them out and give them to me. All of them. Then maybe I’ll sit next to you.”

Lovelace stared at me for a second. “Damn, they really got to you, didn’t they?” Her voice was almost wondering. She shook her head. “Alright, fine. I’ll take out the weapons and put them out of reach. Good enough for you?"

“So you  _ were _ armed.” I crossed my arms and glared at her, but she just smiled at me.

“Of course I was. But I wasn’t lying, either.” Lovelace started to dig in her pockets, trawling through them. “I don’t intend to hurt you.” Her voice was soft, and the lamp light lit up some parts of her face, leaving harsh shadows on others. The effect was a stark contrast between light and dark playing across her skin, making her look even more alluring than she had before. Lovelace’s lashes cast feathered shadows over her eyes, and I tried not to stare too obviously at her, but that became impossible fast when she pulled a six-inch knife from her pants. My eyes widened. She looked up at me and gave me a satisfied half-smile. “Modified sheath in my pocket.” 

“Oh,” I said. “Of course. That… makes sense.”

The half-smile grew into a grin, and she nodded. “You know, I thought so too.” There was an undertone to her voice that might have been teasing, and despite myself I blushed. 

Lovelace brushed a strand of hair behind her ear and went back to digging through her clothes. She pushed back her jacket and pulled out a gun from a modified holster, then reached a hand into the lining and pulled out another two knives. I raised my eyebrows in surprised, impressed.

“So if you weren’t coming to hurt me, what’s all the overkill for?” I nodded at the growing pile of things meant to slash, shoot, and generally kill and incapacitate people with extreme efficiency. 

Lovelace shrugged. “You never know the kind of strangers you’ll meet. I couldn’t be sure Goddard didn’t have people around your apartment.” She pulled out another gun from the back of her pants and set it on the pile. “That’s everything.” Then she sat back and watched me as I scanned her and the weapons. 

I noticed a slight bulge around her shoes and frowned. “Ankle holster.” She made a face, but pulled another gun out and set it with the rest. I looked her up and down again, this time more carefully, and noticed another slight warping of fabric, around her chest.  _ What?  _ “Are… are you hiding a gun in your bra?”

She laughed. “I was waiting to see if you’d notice. You know, Minkowski, you’re actually okay at this.” Lovelace reached into her shirt, and I tried very, very hard not to look. Instead I focused on her shoulder as she brought out a tiny pistol and put it down. 

I exhaled slightly and looked her in her brown eyes, which shone in the light. “Lie to me again and I won’t just kick you out, I’ll call for backup as I do.”

Lovelace’s face sobered. “I’m not lying. I’m done. You can take everything away now, I don’t care.” She took a visible breath and leaned forwards. “I’m taking some of this on faith, too. I’m praying that they haven’t totally brainwashed you and that there’s enough left of Renee Minkowski in there that you won’t try to kill me again.” Something about the way she said it hit a chord in my chest, and I swallowed hard. In that moment Lovelace seemed like she knew me and Goddard both like the back of her hand, dirty secrets and all, and I was the lesser of two evils.

When I spoke, my voice was hoarse. “What makes you think I’m the same thing as my job? Or that, somehow, this is what I’m heading towards?”

Lovelace shrugged. Then she scooted away from the lamp and the pile of weapons, towards the other end of the couch, and looked at me. “I did what I said I would do. That’s everything. Gather it all up, put it somewhere else, and then sit with me. Because we have a  _ lot _ to talk about.”


	4. Chapter 4

I walked over to the sofa and slowly picked up all of Lovelace’s various firearms and blades, careful not to let them slice my arms open. Bleeding isn’t usually a turn-on for the girls, and if it was for Lovelace, this wasn’t how I wanted to find out. I dumped them over in the room’s furthest corner, out of her line of sight, then headed back over and sat next to her, far enough away that I wasn’t touching her, almost but not quite out of arm’s reach. “What, exactly, do you have to say to me?” 

My shadow fell over her as she turned to face me, draping her arm over the backrest of the couch like we were having a casual conversation. She leaned her head against it and gave me a look that made me shiver. “You already know that Goddard is the villain of this story, Minkowski. So talk to me and tell me why you’re working with them.”

I shrugged. “It pays the bills.” Inside, though, I shivered. The first rule you learn when you’re in Goddard Futuristics’ pocket is never to question why you’re there or why you stay. But Lovelace had, and she was… what? A fugitive? A revolutionary against the company? I swallowed hard.

Lovelace snorted. “Don’t make me laugh. Tell me the real reason you’re working with them. Tell me why you don’t leave.” 

“I-” My throat seemed to close as my mind went blank. “I have to.” 

“Do you, Minkowski? Look at me and tell me your reasons for working for Goddard.” Lovelace’s words were like a vise, clamping down, leaving no room for me to twist out of answering. Then her voice softened. “Talk to me, Renee.” The way she said my name hit me like a punch to the stomach. It wasn’t like Cutter said it-- Lovelace’s words were genuine, not saccharine-sweet and full of buried malice. 

No one had said my name like that in a long,  _ long _ time. 

I felt a familiar pinch of pain behind my eyes as I opened my mouth, but damn if that was going to stop me. The dam was broken, the floodgates had been opened, and I was talking. 

“At first it was because I wanted to,” I said. “I thought… I honestly, genuinely thought Goddard was doing the right thing. I thought they were the good guys, the white hats. I’m still not convinced they aren’t the ones and we’re not wrong. And they offered me everything I had wanted.” I paused, remembering my dream from-- from when? Wanting to write musicals seemed so far away. “Well, not everything.” Lovelace’s eyes were on my face, questioning, but I didn’t stop to clarify. No sense in indulging nostalgia; the fantasies of my youth can go fuck themselves. “Not everything, but enough. They offered to make me matter. They offered command, and importance, and…” I shook my head. “And then when they had me eating out of their hand, they took my husband.” Lovelace jerked her head back slightly and made a small noise of surprise, and I scowled. “Don’t say anything.” The last thing I needed now, as the headache was intensifying again--  _ What was that? Why was it doing that? _ \-- was Lovelace butting in. I glared at her, and she exhaled through her nose and nodded. I continued. “They didn't do anything to him, or take him away physically. But I was on a mission for months, and they told him I was dead, and he remarried. I know what that was; an attempt to make me dependent on them, to--” My head throbbed, and I stopped talking briefly, blinking hard. I felt a hand on my knee and opened my eyes to see that Lovelace had moved closer to touch me, maybe meant to be comforting. Maybe to show pity I didn't need. Maybe to make me think she cared as she sucked the information out of me like a leech with blood. 

You can never trust anyone in my business. You can never trust anyone outside it either. It’s a fact of life, but I’d be damned if I cared about it anymore. I leaned towards her touch. 

“The bosses were isolating me. Taking everyone away, slowly, to leave me with nothing and no one but Goddard.” I looked away from Lovelace’s eyes as my own vision blurred. “It worked.” I was silent for a moment, lost in the screaming of my own grey matter until Lovelace squeezed my knee and I turned back towards her. “I work for Goddard, Captain, because there’s no one else I can go to. I have  _ no one  _ left. I’m alone, and god fucking dammit, even if they lied about absolutely everything I think this still might be better than being unemployed and helpless in this job market.” I paused, then laughed a bitter laugh. “Besides, it’s not like you can turn in your two weeks’ notice at the company and walk away with the cute houseplant you used to brighten up your desk.” The band of pain tightened again around my head, and I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled away from Lovelace’s hands. She drew her eyebrows together in confusion, and I narrowed my eyes. “What are you doing to me? Why are you doing this to me? Goddard employs hundreds of employees. Thousands, all over the goddamn world, and all of them with sob stories just as bad as mine or worse. Lovelace, I’ve got a question for you now.” My voice dropped almost involuntarily to a whisper. “Why me?”

Lovelace paused, and I could see pain in her dark, liquid eyes. When she spoke, her voice was low and direct, each word precise. “Because they didn’t break you, Minkowski. They-”

I cut her off, lowering my voice and gritting my teeth. “Haven’t you been  _ listening? _ They did break me. I’m doing their nefarious bidding now. I just told you that, Isabel  _ dearest. _ ” I put as much of Cutter’s inflection and tone into my voice as I could, and she flinched back slightly, her broad shoulders twitching up a fraction into a defensive pose. Pain stabbed through my head and I tensed, waiting for the punch I was sure was coming.

Nothing happened.

Lovelace took a deep breath, and I saw her forcing her posture to relax. “You’re not,” she said. There was more of a biting edge now, cutting deeper into me like a dagger through a heart. “I’ve seen broken. Broken is no free will. Broken is no fighting. Broken is being so far gone that you  _ can’t _ fight, that you’re nothing but a puppet being pulled by strings leading up to the higher levels. When you see someone that broken, all you can possibly do is let them out of their misery.” 

“Is that what you do, Captain? Let people out of their misery?” I leaned over, placing my hands on the couch between us and getting in her face, close enough that I could feel her breath warm on my face, could see each of her eyelashes individually. “If Goddard is the villain, are you the hero here? And if you’re going to say you are, I want you to look at me, Lovelace.  _ Look at me _ .” It hurt to see her, but I kept my eyes wide.

Lovelace didn’t even blink, just watched me with eyes as dark and deep as the damn ocean. “There are no heroes here, Minkowski. Even if there were, I wouldn’t be one of them.” I opened my mouth to say something, and she cut me off. “Yeah. I kill people, Minkowski. Not because I’m a hero, or because I think it’s best for them. When I off people, it’s because they’re trying to acquaint me or many others with someplace dark, quiet, and six feet underground.” She shook her head, slowly. “I know. I know I’m hurting you. But I chose you because of that.” She reached up and touched my head, and everything tilted. I made a noise of pain, but she didn't pull away. Through a fog I heard her voice. “All this, all the brainwashing, everything they put inside you trying to take control… your subconscious is fighting.” She reached her other hand up to my head and began to massage my temples, and the pain began to lift. My strength drained out of me, too, and I slumped against her. 

It had been a long day in a long week in a long month in very, very long years.

I reached my hand out, but didn't touch her. “Lovelace… was this what you wanted to say?” My voice was barely audible, but I felt her hands pause for just a moment.

“I wanted to let you know.” Her thumbs pressed against my skin in slow, smooth circles, pressure building and releasing, and I imagined her nails digging into my brain and skin and pulling out the pain bit by bit. “No heroes here,” she said, and her voice was slow and smooth and deep. I melted into her like butter, pressing towards her and against her as she talked. “There’s just us, Minkowski. Just us and the blockades they put up all around the inside of your head.” 

Maybe if I had been fully conscious I would have worried about that. As it was, I nodded once, then blacked out with my head in the enemy’s hands.


	5. Chapter 5

_ Blue light glowing from Lovelace’s hands as she reached out to me, cupping my face in her hands and drawing me closer. She kissed me and it burned like napalm, but only for an instant until it dissolved into pleasure and her body on mine, both of us moving together like one person until she pulled away. I saw her eyes, suffused with a blue as bright as the skin of a poison dart frog, a warning that came far too late because-- my head, my head, my _ head _ , the top of my skull feeling like it would pop off like a champagne cork, like a spring uncoiling, and Lovelace’s shining hands tightening around my neck until there was nothing but shadow in my eyes. When she spoke, it was Cutter’s voice from her mouth. _

_ “Where’s your loyalty to the company, Renee?” _

I woke with a start to the sun peeking through a gap in my curtains and, making my apartment look even dingier than it had at night. Lovelace was nowhere to be seen, and for a moment I thought everything from the last night had been a dream. Then I sat up and her leather jacket slid off me, landing on the floor with a quiet  _ thump _ . I looked down at it, then around at my house, taking stock. One apartment, one me, one… 

The bathroom door opened, and Lovelace came out in a cloud of steam, dressed in her ensemble from last night. She raised an eyebrow at me. “The slumbering damsel hath awoken. Good morning, Minkowski.” 

“I see you helped yourself to my bathroom.” I wanted to be angry that she had gone in and taken what she wanted, but apparently I was being honest with myself for once, and I was just angry that she had the presence of mind to get dressed afterwards. Her hair was dripping, but not onto the floor-- she had wrapped a towel around her neck, and the threadbare white of it contrasted nicely with the dark brown of her skin. It accentuated the clean lines of her neck, bringing out her elegance, and I cursed her mentally for being able to make a damn rag look like a fashion choice. I sat back on the couch, leaning against it and tilting my head to look at her. “Were you planning on staying, O Captain? Or were you going to do the unchivalrous thing and leave before I woke up?”

She snorted. “If I had wanted to do that, don’t you think I’d have already left?”

“I’m not sure what I think,” I said, keeping my gaze level. “Seeing as you came into my home, scared me half to death, unloaded a small armory onto my floor, and then told me… what, that Goddard is inside my head? I’m still not sure what you want me to do, Lovelace.”

Lovelace sat down on the other end of the couch, looking at me. “I thought that was obvious. I want you to help me take Goddard down from the inside.” At my widened eyes, “I’m not shitting you here, Minkowski, stop gaping.”

“Wait, let me sort this all out.” I turned my body towards her and leaned back against the armrest of the couch. “You,” I pointed an accusing index finger at her, “want  _ me _ to infiltrate Goddard and, what, kill Cutter?”

“Oh  _ god,  _ no.” She shook her head, looking appalled at the very idea. “It’s a little early in our relationship for me to send you on a fucking suicide mission, don’t you think? No, killing Cutter is definitely off the table for now.” Her eyes changed then, becoming determined and opaque, and her voice went low and unyielding. “Besides, when the time comes I want to do it myself.”

In that moment, Lovelace looked like she could kill Cutter if she wanted to. She looked like she could do  _ anything  _ if she wanted to, and it sent a not entirely unpleasant tingle down my spine. I slapped myself mentally for it.  _ Dammit, Lieutenant Minkowski, keep your cool. She’s still the enemy. You’re not going to work with her, are you? Because no matter how cool-headed she seems, no matter how confident she is in her plans, no matter how she’s helped you or, god forbid, how attracted to her you are, you need to remember: there’s no getting out of Goddard. You’re going to double-cross her eventually. _ I thought about this, and my heart sank even as I remembered her words.

_ Are these my thoughts, or the company’s? _

_ Does it really matter? It’s true. _

“Earth to Minkowski, come in Minkowski.” My consciousness snapped back to reality like a rubber band, and I jolted. Lovelace arched an eyebrow at me. “You okay there?

“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded weak and unconvincing, even to me, so I cleared my throat and tried again, uncomfortably aware of her eyes on my face. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You sure about that?” Lovelace was watching me intently. “You disappeared into your head for a minute there. Are you feeling alright?” I could see what she really meant from looking at her face, her brows drawn together in concern; she was asking me if my head was hurting again. If they were getting to me. 

Maybe they were, but I nodded anyways. “I’m fine, Lovelace. Just tired, that’s all.” I took a deep breath. “Maybe you should go.” She looked surprised and disappointed at that, and I winced. I hated letting girls down, and I especially hated doing it to Lovelace, despite how I knew now that I was going to be the ultimate disappointment to her in the end. I tried not to imagine what the look on her face when I became the Brutus to her Caesar would be as she leaned forwards slightly, examining my expression. I tried even harder to keep my face blank and inscrutable, hoping to god that she wouldn’t see my decision written all over it in the same blood my hands were covered in. 

Lovelace’s gaze never wavered as she looked at me, until finally she pulled back. The set of her lips showed me that she didn’t quite believe me, but she didn’t call me out on it-- she probably thought I was being truthful when I said I was just tired. I felt sorry for her for that. She sighed. “If you really want me to, I’ll leave. Goddard will be providing you with my next whereabouts anyways, we can rendezvous there.”

I wanted to reach out and tell her no, that I hadn’t meant it, I wanted her here to stay ( _ or maybe you just want her, Minkowski, maybe you just want someone who actually knows what’s going on _ ) but my mouth took over for my brain too fast and left me stumbling in its wake. “It’s better if you leave. I’ll see you later, anyways. You don’t need to stay here.” Her face was an unreadable mask, but I thought I saw a flash of discouragement in her eyes as she looked at me. My heart beat painfully, and I came within a half-second of changing my mind again, of opening my mouth and telling her so, but she cut me off.

“It’s better if I go now anyways.” Lovelace stood up and took the towel from around her neck, draping it over her arm. “What should I do with this?” 

“Just put it on the sofa. I’ll deal with it later. And your weapons are over in the corner.” I craned my back and gestured to the pile in the corner of the room, and Lovelace nodded.

“Good to know.” She dropped the towel on the sofa and headed towards the pile, then bent down and started to slide the various implements into hidden sheaths and holsters in her clothing. Watching her, I was again impressed by how thoroughly she was able to hide everything in her clothing, even without-- I spotted her jacket again, on the floor near the couch, and grabbed it

I called to her, holding it up for her to see. “You forgot your jacket. Don’t you want it?” She turned and looked at it, then gave me a small, mischievous smile that made the bottom drop out of my stomach. I prayed to whatever shitty god we have that I wasn’t blushing, but from the vaguely self-satisfied tint to her expression I guessed that maybe I hadn’t prayed hard enough. Fair enough. After all, I didn’t believe in god much these days anyways. 

“Keep it,” she said, then slid the last gun into her bra and straightened up. “I’ve got enough room in these clothes for everything regardless.” I stared for a moment, but she pretended not to notice. “I’ll see you later, Minkowski.” 

The way Lovelace said it was alarmingly final, like she was certain. For good reason; I may have been planning to be her answer to a Benedict Arnold, but even being the knife in her back couldn’t stop me from going to see her tonight.

Besides, I needed the information for later. 

Lovelace walked around the couch towards the door, and I stood up, setting the jacket down on the cushions. I hadn’t meant to say anything, but I opened my mouth anyways. “Lovelace,” I said, as she put her hand on the door handle. “Be careful out there.” 

“I’m always careful,” she said. Then she left, shutting the door behind her just a tad bit too hard, and I collapsed back on the sofa, staring after her.

After a moment, I put her jacket on. It smelled like her, and even though I was sick to my stomach with the guilt I had brought on myself, I inhaled deep. 


	6. Chapter 6

Goddard contacted me through my phone at noon with news on the captain’s whereabouts later in the day.  _ Back room of the Hephaestus bar, 11 pm. She’ll be there. Take her out or don’t, but one way or another make sure you leave with more information than she does.  _

I stared at the message, then deleted it. The Hephaestus bar at 11. I’d never been there before, but there was always a first time for everything. Besides, in this age of miracles, Google Maps could probably get me there with no trouble. That was only part the problem, though. The other part was considerably more significant.

I didn’t know if I could kill Lovelace on my own. Oh, I knew it was inevitable that she would die. But even if half of me wasn’t me at all, even if I kept picking at my own brain to find where the seam was, even if I was a backstabber and a bitch and a corrupted corporate robot, I couldn't imagine putting her down. Fatal flaw, I guessed. Maybe I just had a soft spot for people who kissed me like she did.

Part of me wanted to take her up on her offer. I don’t have a lot to live for, anyways, and dying next to someone who cared about me rather than for some faceless corporation sounded worth it. Dying as myself, rather than as a puppet. With Lovelace. 

Even as I thought about it, I knew how impossible the idea was. Like I said, alive is a spectrum at Goddard, not a state of being. There are worse things than death, and they know how to do them all. And Lovelace, well, who knew what her intentions really were beyond all the charm and the seeming sincerity. She wasn’t a hero, wasn’t a villain. In my experience, people who say that about themselves are usually too cocky for their own good, and I had already seen her overconfidence in how she trusted me with no consideration for how I might hurt her. Lovelace had helped me, sure, but I believed she could and would turn on me in a second if she wanted to.  _ I _ was sentimental-- there must have been, as Lovelace said, enough of Renee Minkowski left in me to have that. Too much to kill her outright, at least. The captain was a different story entirely; she wasn’t controlled, but I wasn’t sure if it was me she really wanted, or if she would have done the same to anyone else in my position with the skill set and the mindset she needed. All the physical intimacy was probably a ploy, to convince my touch-starved body that she was here and trustworthy and that I was special so my mind would follow. If I let it work, then she’d win. 

I stared at the message for a while, considering the options. Then I slumped, defeated. I’d go to the bar. I’d talk to Lovelace. And tonight she’d go home intact and satisfied, with me boiling like a lobster in a pot of self-hatred behind her. It was how things would be, as immutable a fact as the sun rising in the morning or gravity pulling us down to earth. I turned my phone off and tossed it on the bed, then sat down on the edge of it and put my head in my hands. I was in far, far too deep, barely treading water as the sharks swam beneath me, waiting for my blood. 

There was one thought I kept to console myself, the same thought I always had on the difficult missions:  _ when this is over, at least you’ll be alive. _ But today I guessed something in me wasn’t listening, because as I repeated it like a mantra a quiet thread of thought welled up from somewhere deep.

_ You’ll be alive, sure, _ it said.  _ But at what cost? _

* * *

I arrived at the bar at 10:45 pm, parking close enough that I could make a quick getaway but far enough that my junker didn’t give away my location. I got out of the car and straightened Lovelace’s jacket, pulling it closer around me as my breath floated away like smoke in the cold night air. Then I shivered and headed into the bar, shifting my walk and my expression to say  _ Don’t fuck with me. _ I didn’t have any time to spend on other people’s bullshit right now.

I shoved open the door into the warm, sepia-lit interior of the bar, letting it swing shut behind me with a squeaking of hinges. The Hephaestus wasn’t a pretty picture; it looked old and barely functioning, and smelled of long-stale beer and spilled liquor. The finish on the dark wood of the few tables was nicked, with people’s initials and vulgar sentiments carved in, and the few clientele drank like they were trying to drown themselves along with their sorrows. A woman behind the bar cleaned glasses mechanically, but not well-- I watched her pick one up, swipe it with a cloth, and then put it down with no regard for the stain still on it. I headed towards her, the tread of my boots clomping on the stained hardwood floor, and sat on one of the barstools facing her, tapping on the surface of the bar for her attention. The bartender looked up at me from her work with strange, light eyes. “What do you want?” she asked, setting another glass down to dry. Her voice was pleasant enough, but her words seemed to cut out in the middle, a strange sort of stutter. Her name tag read “Hera”.

“I want into your back room. There’s a woman there who wants to see me, or there will be soon.” I checked my watch. 10:52 pm. “I can pay you if need be.”

Bartender Hera’s eyes widened, and she shook her head furiously. “No one gets into the back room.” I opened my mouth to protest, but she cut me off, her voice forceful behind an intentionally thin veneer of politeness. “I apologize, miss whoever-you-are, but you’re just going to have to buy a drink like everyone else or get out of the bar.”

“Oh, lay off, Hera.” Lovelace’s voice from behind me made me start in surprise, flinching. She moved around to the side and stood next to me, leaning on the counter towards Hera. “She’s with me.” 

Hera glared daggers at her, then relented and sighed. “Whatever you say, Captain Lovelace,  _ sir. _ ” The tone of voice spoke to a history between the two of them, and I wasn't sure I wanted to know what kind of history it was. She reached under the bar, took out a ring of keys, and tossed them with a jingling clatter onto the bar next to Lovelace’s arm. “You owe me for this.”

“Do I?” Lovelace raised an eyebrow, but Hera merely rolled her eyes and turned away, going back to cleaning. Lovelace shook her head, then turned towards me and laid her hand gently on my elbow. “Come on.” I didn’t do anything for a moment too long, and she exhaled loudly, then wrapped her hand around my leather-clad arm and tugged. “Minkowski,” she said, her voice low and insistent, “come  _ on.” _ I finally slid off the barstool and onto the floor, and she led me behind the bar to a door set in the woodwork, wallpapered over until it was barely visible. Lovelace slid a key from the ring into its lock, turned it, and then she opened it and we walked through into a dimly-lit room, followed by-- I checked-- Hera’s all-too-conspicuous stare of disapproval. The door swung shut behind us, and then it was just me and Lovelace. 

I looked around at the deserted back room of the Hephaestus. It was more cramped than I had expected, but at second glance I realized that my impression of a small room had been wrong. The place was big, maybe even more so than the bar out front. What gave it the claustrophobic feeling was everything inside it. The walls were lined with shelves and glass cases, and behind them were layers upon layers of knick knacks and memorabilia, stacked two or more deep. I peered into the nearest one and saw, through the smears of dust, a dead-eyed automaton staring back out from behind a jar of gears and metal parts. Glancing around, I saw even more strange things: a rubber band ball the size of my head, old farm tools from times my grandfather might have remembered but I didn’t, clocks in strange shapes, a rusting typewriter. Propped on one shelf was an ancient photograph of a man who seemed familiar in a disturbing way, his piercing eyes staring out beyond the portrait and into my head. I squinted at it for a moment, then shuddered, taking a step back. It was a picture of an only slightly younger Cutter, in a portrait that seemed almost a hundred years old. 

I stepped back, away from the sheer, overwhelming amounts of  _ stuff _ in that room. I’m no stranger to weird-- the job mostly desensitized me to it a long time ago-- but the way this place was packed, like a hoarder with access to various museums was using it as a storage warehouse, well. That was unnerving even to me. My fight-or-flight instincts kicked into overdrive, but my bolting from the room was stopped by Lovelace’s hand, still warm on my arm. “Hey, hey.” Her voice was soothing, and the adrenaline started to drain from my body. “It’s overwhelming at first, I know. Hera’s got a lot of junk stashed around. Goddard stuff from ye olden days, etc.” 

Lovelace moved in front of me, tugging me towards the center of the room, and for the first time I noticed the setup there-- a couple of armchairs and a coffee table. I looked at her and raised an eyebrow. “Wow, really went out of your way to make this cozy.”

“What, you didn’t expect me to make you sit on the floor, did you?” Lovelace moved over to the far side of the table and sat down, leaning back like a queen into the red upholstery. She was wearing another button-down collared shirt, this one light blue, with a well-fitting black vest over it. The first few buttons of the shirt were undone, leaving her throat exposed and open. I tried not to focus too hard on that fact, that little piece of vulnerability.  _ Remember what you’re going to do, Minkowski. _

“You know,” I said, shaking off the hesitance and settling down in the chair across from her, “I think that just might be a good idea.” I pulled my legs up into the chair and tucked them underneath me, then sighed, sitting curled up in the soft seat. The armchair was more comfortable than any piece of furniture I’d sat on in a long time. “So, Captain. Why am I here? More light conversation?” 

“Hardly.” Lovelace leaned forwards, cupping her chin in her hands and propping her elbows on her legs. “It’s time for Goddard’s reckoning.” 

I swallowed hard, suddenly tasting blood in my mouth. I knew Lovelace wanted to play judge and jury, but I hadn’t known it would be so soon. I hadn’t known how quickly she would want to put wheels in motion. But she had been waiting for five years, and the captain wasn’t about to stop herself now. Being her stumbling block suddenly seemed harder than I thought it would be.

Lovelace looked at me quizzically and I winced. “I… Lovelace, I think I need one hell of a drink before the revolution starts.”

Lovelace tilted her head, then shrugged. “That’s valid. I mean, I could use one too. Do you want me to--?” She started to get up and I shook my head quickly.

“No, no, no. I got this.” I stood up before she could, shoving myself out of the chair. “I’ve got money.” For some reason, the thought of Lovelace going back into the bar with Hera bothered me, maybe more than it should have. But she gave me a single nod and then sat back down, and I turned and left the room of a thousand objects to go back into the main room of the Hephaestus. 

The door shut behind me with a  _ click _ , and I walked back over to the bar, adjusting my walk as I did so I didn’t look like I felt. I slid around the side of the bar to where Hera was, still cleaning glasses like clockwork. When she saw me, she paused in her work, putting down the tumbler she was working on slowly and deliberately. “What do you need now?” 

Her voice held a tinge of annoyance, and I scowled. “Depends. What here has a lot of alcohol and costs less than…” I opened up my wallet and began counting. “Twenty dollars?”

Hera rolled her odd, metallic eyes and turned around to the shelves of liquor, then plunked a bottle of vodka down on the wooden top of the bar, along with two shot glasses. I raised an eyebrow at her, but she just sighed. “That’ll be sixteen dollars and seventy cents. Please.” 

I pulled the twenty from my wallet and handed it to her, and she nodded, then gestured. “Go. Talk to Captain Lovelace.” Her face softened briefly into something a little softer, a little less foreboding. “Good luck.” The two words hit me like a set of brass knuckles to the gut, and my muscles stiffened as I rocked back on my heels slightly. I stared at Hera for a moment, then took a deep breath and grabbed the bottle and glasses off the counter, abandoning the charade and heading back into the room with Lovelace with quick steps.

I pushed the door open and headed over to the table, putting the bottle and glasses down. Lovelace sat up, leaning forwards to read the label. “Alright, going for cheap but strong. I like it.” 

“Yeah, well, let’s see you do better with twenty bucks.” I opened up the bottle and poured a bit of it into each glass, then sat back into my chair and waited for Lovelace to drink. I trusted her, and after what had just happened in the bar I didn’t think Hera would harm us, but I’d been trained too well not to be suspicious.

Another part of me, a deeper part in my chest that was full of something dark and sticky like a tar pit, hoped it was poisoned. At least then it wouldn’t be me who killed Lovelace, not outright. But she lifted the glass to her lips with slow, deliberate movements and drank, and nothing happened. She made a face at the taste, whatever it was. “I’m pretty sure I could distill better vodka than this with twenty bucks.” I watched her for another second, but her body didn't contort in pain, she didn’t seize up, and her eyes stayed clear and focused on mine. “You gonna drink?”

_ What the hell.  _ I picked up the shot glass and threw the contents back into my mouth, feeling the liquor burn as it slid down my throat to rest in my belly. It felt strangely rich in my mouth and smooth as it went down, but left an odd aftertaste on my tongue, with hints of acrid plastic lingering. Unpleasant, but I hadn’t expected anything else. Nonetheless, I cleared my throat and put the glass back down on the table. “You’re too picky, captain. I’ve had worse.” 

Lovelace shook her head. “I’d say,” she said, her voice low, “that I just have good taste.” She gave me a half-smile, the corner of her mouth tilting up just slightly, and my mouth opened slightly, lips parting. 

The warmth from the liquor was starting to spread through my body, and I felt an added feeling as well, a shiver that started at the base of my skull and ran down my spine, making my entire upper body tremble. I reached out my hand and, slightly shaking, poured myself another glass. I tossed it back, then wiped my mouth and put it down. I wondered briefly why my head didn’t hurt now, in Lovelace’s presence, listening to her voice. Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was my tentative decision of her fate. Either way, I was glad for the absence. “Be that as it may, we’re not here to discuss your tastes, Lovelace. You want to take down Goddard. Got a plan?”

“You know I do.” Lovelace reached over and poured herself another shot. “You’re going to kill me.”

My chest contracted, and I spluttered, making a noise like a choking victim. “What? What the fuck around you talking about?” I felt vaguely nauseous, wondering if she knew about my plans to betray her. But no, the look on her face wasn’t accusing, just amused at my reaction. 

“Relax, Minkowski.” Lovelace drank, then leaned back and smiled, wide and beautiful. A pang ran through me, but it was drowned in the flood of relief that followed. She was totally ignorant. “We’re going to stage it. My murder, I mean. You’re going to call Goddard and say I’m dead and that you disposed of my lifeless corpse somewhere else. A lake, maybe.” 

This time I skipped the glass and took the bottle, raising it to my lips and swigging deep. Lovelace raised her eyebrows in an impressed expression as I lowered it, but I ignored her. “Captain Lovelace.  _ Isabel _ ,” I corrected, my voice slightly rough and just a tad louder than I intended, “what the everloving _fuck_ are you talking about? There’s no lake within a hundred miles.” 

“Doesn’t have to be a lake.” Lovelace reached out, motioning for the bottle, and I handed it to her reluctantly. She lifted it to her mouth and chugged a generous amount, then set it on the table and licked her lips. They shined wet in the light. “You just need to tell them that you killed me, one way or another.”

“Okay, but…” I trailed off, shaking my head. “It won’t work.” I was starting to feel the buzz from the vodka, making the world a little fuzzy around the edges, softer. I tried to ignore it-- as much as I needed this, it was a bit too soon to be visibly drunk. Especially since Lovelace wasn’t showing any signs that this was affecting her. “Goddard will know you’re not dead. If there’s not enough evidence… hell, even if there is, they’ll follow up.”

Lovelace shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. We can delay the investigation. I’ve got evidence, anyways; I drew some blood from myself a while back, enough to manufacture a crime scene. Shouldn’t be hard to use that, add a few splatters, get the job done. And they don’t need to believe us forever, just long enough for you to let me into headquarters so I can destroy their conditioning equipment.”

“Whoa, whoa,” I cut in, holding up my hand for her to stop. I needed to keep this information, and for that I needed her to talk slower. “How are you going to do that? Do you have any idea what to do to shut everything down, or how to get to it? I’ve been wandering around Goddard HQ for years, and I’ve never seen any of this. How are you going to get to it?”

Lovelace shrugged. “Hera’s got the information. She’s not coming with us, her training is way too deep to come anywhere near Goddard for, oh, ever, but she’s got information pipelines reaching everywhere and she’s willing to help. Hera was… plugged into the mainframe for a while. It’s kind of a miracle she managed to get out.”

Something about the vague admiration in her voice when she talked about Hera bothered me, and before I really realized it I had opened my mouth. “Is Hera your ex?”

Lovelace laughed. “No. God, no, never. We’re…. Coworkers with a mutual interest in making those bastards pay for what they did. What they did to…” Lovelace shook her head and gestured widely. “To  _ everyone. _ Everyone they’ve ever wronged. When the equipment’s gone, people will come out of their fogs, wake up from the waking nightmares Goddard has put them into.” Her face sobered. “Some of them are going to be too far gone for that. They’ll shut off. But it’s still better.” Lovelace’s voice quieted. “Better than being the mindless vehicles for their evil plots.”

I stared at her openly now, feeling my eyes about to pop out of my head. She was proposing-- what? Release? Freedom, for me, for everyone? The taste of iron and salt filled my mouth again, and I washed it out by knocking out another gulp from the bottle. It had been so long since I’d joined Goddard. Since I had, apparently, been myself. What if she freed me and there was nothing left? What would I even do if I was in control again? I didn’t know. 

Lovelace was holding open the exit door for me in a burning building, and I was, out of necessity, considering pulling her back in with me. 

I looked back up at her, the strong planes of her face softened, her tightly curled hair in disarray around her face, and sighed. “Alright. I’ll help.”  _ I’ll help, until I won’t. I’ll help until I’ll hurt you. _ There was a familiar beat of pain through my head, just once before I pushed the thoughts and the guilt away. 

Lovelace gave me another brilliant smile, leaning forwards. The light shone around her head like a halo, catching in strands of her hair, and I gravitated towards her like iron filings to a magnet. “Goddard’s never gonna know what hit it.” She grabbed the bottle and drank again, then put it down and extended the index finger of her right hand, drawing it slowly across her neck. The dull blurring of reality had reached me fully now, and I could feel myself tilting, having a harder time staying upright in my chair. I smiled back at her, slowly, and her eyes lit up, sparkling. She reached across the coffee table and put her hand on my face, gently stroking my cheek. “You know, Minkowski,” Lovelace said, her voice rich in my ears even as her words were beginning to be unclear around the edges, “you’re so fucking beautiful.” Her eyes were wide as she looked at me, her mouth open, and the blood rushed to my face. 

I leaned into her touch even as the rock of shame weighed down my stomach, threatening to weigh me down to my seat. I shouldn’t have been doing this. Any of this. Touching her, knowing her, caring about her. Dragging her down with me. I should have been pulling away, but I wasn’t going to. 

Instead I picked up the bottle and drank again, downing several large swallows. The world was tilting now, fuzzy, but I managed to put it down out of the way on the table, over to the side. Then I reached over to Lovelace, grabbed her by the collar of her shirt, and pulled her into a kiss. 

Lovelace made a sound of surprise, but didn’t pull away. Instead she leaned in over the table, pushing her hand back over my face and into my hair as she kissed back. She wove her long, delicate fingers through the strands and I whimpered into her mouth, opening my lips against hers. She tasted of nothing, really, nothing but warmth and skin, but she smelled like herself-- lavender and body lotion and a little bit of sweat, surrounding me. Beneath all of that, I could smell hints of my own shampoo on her hair, one indication of how she had been with me at my apartment earlier. One mark of me on her. 

My head might have hurt, but I was too far gone to feel it. 

Lovelace’s body was infuriatingly far from mine over the coffee table, and I pulled back briefly in order to remedy that, untangling myself from her hands to weave my way over to her side. My shin hit the side of the table and I stumbled, but Lovelace reached out and caught me. Her face swam in front of my eyes as she drew me closer, down to sit on her lap. The world blurred, but one thing was clear-- Lovelace, Lovelace’s lips, Lovelace’s face. Lovelace, Lovelace, Lovelace. I straddled her lap and put my hands on her waist, feeling her muscles under her clothing, and she wrapped her arms around me and pulled me in to meet her, kissing me again with one of her hands resting on the small of my back and the other curled around to my shoulders, digging her short nails into my skin through the fabric of the jacket. I made a noise involuntarily, deep in my chest, something pleading. As my mind went blank except for little explosions of gold and red and a deep amber color popping inside my eyelids, I clutched her tighter. I couldn’t remember anything but how much I wanted her, right up until she took her mouth off mine and whispered my name. “Minkowski…”

It came back in an instant of sobriety, the knowledge of what I was doing to her and what I was  _ going _ to do to her flooding my brain like a god damned tsunami. I tried to shove myself off her, but just ended up pulling her down onto the floor with a thump that knocked the breath out of me. Lovelace yelped in surprise, and I let go of her and scooted back on the hardwood until my back bumped against the coffee table. She was looking at me like I had kicked her puppy, and I winced. “I can’t... I’m sorry, I can’t.” My head was too clouded to get out enough words to tell her how I felt.  _ I need you and I want you but I can’t ever have you, because that’s not how the story ends. This is a show that is not for children. The good guys always die. _ But she just reached out to me and put her hand on one of mine, and I couldn’t bring myself to shake her off.

“Was it something I did?” Her words were thick and clumsy, but I could hear the genuine concern in them. It hurt. It hurt a lot.

I shook my head. It was hard to get words out that made sense, like swimming through syrup, but dammit I was putting my flippers on. “No. No. I just,” I said, enunciating as clearly as I could even though my tongue felt odd in my mouth, “I  _ think _ we should finish this when Goddard’s gone down.” No need to tell her that wouldn’t happen. 

Lovelace’s eyes were wide and shining, but she nodded. “Okay. That… yeah. Yes. You should…” Lovelace gestured with her hand not on mine. “You should go home. We’re not gonna get anything else finished here.” As if the two coherent sentences had worn her out, she slumped back slightly. She looked distinctly in disarray now, her hair mussed and the collar of her shirt wrinkled where I had grabbed it to pull her into a kiss. She was still so heartbreakingly beautiful. 

It took a moment for her words to actually reach my brain, but when they did I nodded. “Yeah. Makes… sense. I should…” My words trailed off for a moment until I remembered what I was going to say. “I should ask Hera to call a cab. Are you gonna come too?” 

Lovelace shook her head. “I’ll crash here.” She wrapped her hand around mine and squeezed. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Minkowski. We’ll finish the plan.” Then she let go, closed her eyes, and leaned back against the bottom of the armchair, resting her head. I looked at her for a moment, then leveraged myself up with the coffee table and wobbled my way out of the room, back to the bar.

The night was blurry after that, fuzzy and out of focus like a bad home movie. I remembered Hera looking exhausted as she called me a ride home, and the quiet emptiness of the Hephaestus with all the regulars gone or passed out, and the yellow street lamp outside in the cold night air. The lingering feeling of Lovelace’s mouth on mine. The cab ride home was more of a hole in my memory, but I remembered arriving to the dark of my apartment and stumbling into my bed, not bothering to get undressed. Then I remembered nothing, nothing but the dark dreamlessness of sleep and the lingering feeling that I shouldn’t be alone.  


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter's late, guys! I initially intended to combine it with the next chapter, but since it's already looking like that one is going to be really long I thought it was best to post this one separately. Thank you all so much for reading and for your kind comments! I'm sorry I don't have the energy to really respond, but I promise I see all of them and really appreciate your encouragement.

Lovelace didn’t knock on my door the next morning like I had expected. Instead she let herself in the same way she had the first time, and at a far too early time after last night’s drinking I felt her hands on my shoulders shaking me awake out of a restless sleep into a merciless waking state. I opened my gluey, itchy eyes to her face hovering right over mine, and Lovelace smiled even though the bags under her eyes indicated that she hadn’t slept any better than I had. “Wake up, sleepyhead. Smell the bacon.” 

The mere mention of food made my stomach turn in nausea, and I groaned. “I don’t  _ want _ bacon, Lovelace. I want to go back to sleep.” My voice was whiny and I knew I was embarrassing myself, but I was too uncomfortable to care; every time I opened my mouth my stomach felt like it was trying to climb out, while the sunlight stabbed its way into my barely-open eyes for a post-night-out headache simultaneously duller and more pervasive than the mind control-induced ones. I wanted, desperately, to go back to being unconscious. 

Lovelace wasn’t having it. As I tried to pull away from her to bury my head back into my pillow, she shook her head and tugged back on my arm, hard enough to drag me halfway out of bed. “Minkowski, you are going to get out of this bed and talk about killing me  _ this instant. _ ”

Immediately the nausea became much more pronounced, and I wrenched my arm out of her grasp and got up fast, moving as quickly as I could manage to  the bathroom so I could kneel over the porcelain basin of the toilet and retch. Last night’s vodka tasted even worse coming up than it did going down. As I bent over and vomited my guts out, I felt cool hands slide over my head and hold my hair out of my face.  _ Lovelace _ . 

She held me until it was over, then let go when I was done, moving back slightly. Her voice was hushed when she spoke, soothing. “Yeah, that was me earlier too. Drinking on an empty stomach maybe wasn’t the best idea. Do you want some water?” 

I shook my head, even though I knew that water was a good idea in my dehydrated state. I couldn’t let Lovelace do anything else for me. I couldn’t-- the memory of last night hit me, and I froze, my throat seizing up. I had kissed Lovelace. Again.  _ Again. _ And she hadn’t pulled away. She had been so sincere...

A strangled noise came from my mouth, and she looked down at me in concern. “Minkowski?” 

I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and looked up at her. “I’m fine. I’m fine, Lovelace. I just,” I reached up and grabbed the edge of my counter, hauling myself up, “need to get going.” I glanced at her, trying to analyze her face to see if she believed me or not, but there was no suspicion in her eyes. All I could see on her face was worry, and that hit harder.

I couldn’t even try to convince myself anymore that she was manipulating me. She cared about me, genuinely cared, like no one had done for me for years. Lovelace wasn’t using subterfuge to get close to me, and she wasn’t manipulating me. I was the one manipulating and betraying. I was her Judas. I felt tears prick my eyelids and looked away. 

I could never have had her, anyways; everything good I hold in my hands crumbles to dust one way or another. Better to rip off the bandaid of my own accord. 

With that thought in my mind, I straightened up into a standing position and looked her in the eye. My stomach was still roiling and there was a sour taste in my mouth, but I shoved the discomfort back down into a corner of my mind, stomping it flat. Lovelace looked at me for a moment more, then shook her head slightly and looked away. “Okay, Minkowski. Whatever you say. Just… get dressed and brush your teeth. Today is a big day.” And with that she left, walking out of the bathroom and into the living room. 

It must have been a bad habit, how I noticed the smooth grace in her steps. 

I shook my head and shut the door, then turned back to the sink, looking at my reflection in the mirror. My skin was pale, and some dark strands of my hair were plastered to my cheeks and forehead with sweat while others stuck out in every direction. Under my bloodshot eyes were dark circles like my sleepless night had punched me in the face. I looked, in other words, like death, if death had been mugged in a dark alley and then curbstomped. I sighed, running my hands through my hair to push it back from my face, then picked up my toothbrush. 

One tooth-brushing and changing session later, I emerged into the living room looking slightly less terrible but feeling exactly as awful as before. Lovelace had made herself comfortable on my couch again with her feet on my coffee table and a backpack next to her, and she was-- I froze, then walked over and snatched the book she was reading out of her hands. “Don’t mess with my things without asking.”

“Sorry, Minkowski.” Lovelace paused, then raised an eyebrow and gave me an amused look. “Can’t say I regret it, though. Why do you own a copy of  _ 50 Shades of Grey _ ?”

My blood rose to my cheeks, heating them up to the temperature of a furnace. “None of your business.” I scowled at her, but she just smiled wider, and my heart hurt for half a beat. I turned around and walked back over to my bookshelf so Lovelace wouldn’t see my face. “Just don’t touch my damn things.” There was more hostility in my voice than I intended, and as I turned around I saw Lovelace’s face settle back into careful neutrality. 

Lovelace swung her legs off the table and sat up straight, looking directly at me. “I won’t do it again.” She patted the couch next to herself, and I hesitated for just a moment before walking over and sitting down just far enough away that our bodies weren’t touching. 

I saw in her glance that she noticed the distance, but she didn't comment. Instead she just turned and pulled the backpack she had over onto her lap. I noticed for the first time how strange the bag looked, and how oddly heavy it seemed to be. Lovelace was handling it with unusual care, as well. I looked from it to her and back, then sighed. “Alright, I’ll bite. What’s in the bag?” 

Lovelace smiled. “I’m glad you asked, Minkowski.” She unzipped it slowly, then reached inside and pulled out-

“Is that  _ your blood? _ ” I stared at the sealed IV bag and the red liquid sloshing inside. She had said that she had collected her own blood to fake her death, but… “And you were just carrying this around? What if the bag had broken?”

Lovelace looked at the bag she had set on the sofa between us, then shrugged. “That would have been bad, but it didn’t and it won't until you kill me.” I winced visibly when she said that, and she noticed. “I mean, when we start the plan.”

I started at it, then at her. “Today?” I asked, weakly. She had seemed unusually urgent, but I had thought there was time. I thought she hadn’t meant it, that she was exaggerating. But Lovelace’s gaze was level and steady, her jaw set in an expression of determined intent. 

“Yes, Minkowski. It all happens today.” Lovelace reached out to me, but I pulled back. She paused, then moved back. “It has to.”

I narrowed my eyes at her, crossing my arms. “Why, Lovelace? This is rushed and hasty and there’s no way it will work out. You’ve given me what’s barely an outline of a plan, and now you show up in my home with  _ that-- _ ” I gestured at the bag of blood, “--and you expect me to just go along with this? To not ask questions?” I paused. “Wait, actually, how do you even keep getting into my home in the first place?” 

Lovelace shrugged. “I’m just really good at picking locks.” She sighed and some of the fight seemed to go out of her, leaving only a tired-looking woman, a soldier who had been fighting for too long. “You want to know why I’m doing this so fast? Because I’m exhausted. Because there’s only so long a person can live on revenge, and I’m reaching the end of that time.” Her voice went quiet and dangerous and she bared her teeth slightly. “I’m mind-burningly angry at Goddard, and that will never end. What I want more than anything is to utterly destroy the people at the top, physically and mentally. I want to make sure they never hurt anyone ever again.” Then some of the fire went out of her eyes, leaving them heartbreakingly empty. “But, Minkowski… If it was like that, if it was just “punch the bad guy and everything will be fine”, I’d have done it already. It’s not. This whole thing is a chess game, one with people instead of pieces, and there’s only so long I can keep ahead of them. I need to do something about this, about  _ them _ , and it needs to be now.” Lovelace looked at me, and I saw pain etched into the faint lines of her face, pain and loss and sacrifice. “They almost got me, once. They  _ did  _ get me.” She reached down to the hem of her shirt, pulling it up slightly, and my eyes followed as she exposed her torso. Then I inhaled sharply, drawing back in sympathy. 

The smooth brown skin of Lovelace’s stomach gave way, just below her ribs, to a wide, jagged scar that stretched down across her side. My eyes widened as I looked, taking in the raised scar tissue. This was what Goddard had meant when they said they took her out once.  _ This _ was the result.

Something had torn Lovelace open.

I must have made a noise, because Lovelace dropped her shirt, smoothing it back over the evidence of her injury. She looked back up at me, and said, quietly, “Shrapnel wound.” Lovelace shook her head, her hair stirring slightly around her head. “They put a bomb in my apartment. I was lucky. I got out far enough that I only got skewered instead of exploding into a thousand pieces. The people in the apartment next to mine...” She blinked hard and swallowed. I took a deep breath and reached out to her, and she took my hand and held it in both of hers for a moment before letting go. Her eyes, deep and brown, didn’t just have fire in them anymore. Instead I saw something much deeper and far more painful in them. “I’m done waiting, Minkowski.”

Guilt and regret wrapped around my throat like a noose, strangling me and constricting my vocal cords. For a minute I couldn’t speak as Lovelace looked at me. There were so many things warring in my mind-- doubt, fear, self-loathing, condemnation-- and I felt tears prick at my eyes. I couldn’t figure out what to do. My mind was in turmoil, and it hurt, it hurt, it  _ hurt _ \-- right up until a thought popped up that made everything clear. 

_ She was running on borrowed time anyways. We all die, Lieutenant. Better to not die reaching pathetically for something you can’t have.  _

The haze cleared from my mind, and I took a deep breath. “Alright. What’s the plan?” 


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 5000 words. enjoy.

I stared at Lovelace’s body, lying in front of me in a pool of blood at the end of the alleyway. Her limbs were splayed out awkwardly on the ground as if she had just fallen, and her gun rested next to her where it had dropped from her hand onto the cement. Her white t-shirt stained, saturated with bright blooms of red, her skin tinted greyish. She looked very much not alive. 

I examined her cold corpse for a moment, then sighed. “Are you sure you should be lying like that?” I walked around her, observing her position, then returned to stand in front of her lifeless gaze. “It looks kind of unnatural.”

Lovelace’s eyes flicked up to my face, and she snorted. “It’s supposed to look unnatural, Minkowski. I’m dead, right? You’ve seen dead people, they don’t exactly look like they’re sleeping.” Then she went back to staring directly ahead of her, unblinking.

I opened my mouth to argue, then shut it again. It didn’t matter if she looked stiff, if she didn’t look quite dead, if she looked posed. This wasn’t  _ real, _ anyways. All I had to do was get Lovelace close enough to the company’s headquarters that we could bring her in with the least amount of difficulty. Once she was there, I could call in backup, take her into custody. Give her to the bosses for whatever purposes they wanted.

I thought back to how I had called Cutter, in the bathroom of my house before we had left. Well, to how I had called Rachel and been redirected. No one calls Cutter directly.  Strangely, he had seemed more amused than angry when I told him about the situation, his voice carrying the undertones of some sick version of childhood playfulness.

_ “So, let me get this straight, Renee. You’ve had Captain Lovelace under your thumb for, what, four days now? In that time, you’ve met with her multiple times, had the chance to kill her at least twice, and been recruited as a double-agent against the company. Then you decided to double-cross her instead and become some sort of triple-agent. So, what are you waiting for? Why not just kill her now?”  _

_ “She has information, sir.” I swallowed hard, whispering so Lovelace wouldn’t hear. “She knows of at least one other co-conspirator, and there’s other dirt I think she’s not giving me. I’ve done as much as I can on that front, and I think it’s better that I hand her over to you.” I paused. “Or,” I said hesitantly, “I could try means of force. If you wanted.” My stomach was boiling with fear as I waited for his response, my free hand clenched so tight that my nails dug into my palm. _

_ Cutter paused, then laughed. “Oh, no no no. Renee, you’ve done very well for someone with your… weaknesses, but I think you’re finished with this mission for now. If you think she has information, bring her to us. We’ll take care of it.” _

_ “Of course, sir.” _

I took a deep breath, shook my head, and walked a few paces away. “I’m going to take the picture now, Lovelace. Last chance to change your position again, going once… twice…” Lovelace didn’t move, and I sighed. “Well, guess that’s it.” I raised the phone up and snapped a shot of her, lying limp on the ground, then sent it to Cutter, along with a message.  _ Part one of plan complete. Send the cleaners in. I’m leading her back. _

My phone vibrated, showing his response.  _ Good. Bring back our prodigal daughter, Lieutenant.  _ I swallowed hard, then tucked my phone into the pocket of my jeans and looked at Lovelace, who had propped herself up on her elbows and was watching me. “It’s done.” 

Lovelace sighed, then pushed herself up to a standing position. She cracked her neck and brushed off her pant legs, a gesture that almost made me laugh because of the utter futility of it; gobs of her blood were already congealing all over her clothing, what difference could dust make? But she did anyways, smearing blood all over her jeans, and when she was done Lovelace looked back up at me with a small smile on her lips. My heart fluttered, but I didn’t listen to it. The heart does want what it wants, and sometimes it wants some damn stupid things. 

This was one of those times.

Lovelace looked at me with that smile on her face and a shine in her eyes, and I smiled back as best I could with no emotion behind it. “About time,” she said. “I thought you’d never be satisfied with how I was positioned.” The smile gained a mischievous tint. “Are you always this… specific about your preferences, Minkowski?” Lovelace’s voice dropped lower and the quiver in my heart went down with it, first to my stomach, then even farther down. For a moment I imagined being with her, together. I felt the ghost of her lips on mine, the only good thing that came from last night’s drinking. 

Say what you will about Lovelace-- that she was revenge-driven, angry, too trusting for her own good-- but she was a damn fine kisser.

I took a deep breath.  _ You’re never going to get that close again. She’s not your girl, Lieutenant. She’s not even a person. She’s just a corpse. Just a corpse walking.  _ Then I shook my head and focused on the space just next to her eyes, the curled hairs at her temple. “I’m not usually this picky. I just want this all to be believable so we don’t get caught and stuffed into Goddard’s version of the slammer.” 

Lovelace raised an eyebrow at me, then slowly and carefully stepped out of the pools of blood, treading in such a way that she didn’t leave footprints in red on the alley floor. She approached me, her sneakers making slow noises on the cement. “You have a point. Wouldn’t want to give ourselves up when we’re so close to bringing the whole thing down.” She stopped, very close to me, and leaned in to whisper in my ear. I felt her breath on my skin. “But when this is over… maybe you and I could-”

My chest expanded outwards in warmth, then imploded, crushed back like my lungs had been placed in a trash compactor. I stepped back before she could finish the sentence. “I-” I started to speak, but my voice shook like a leaf. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Yeah. Maybe… maybe we could.” Lovelace smiled at me and the pain in my head that had been lessening spiked again, just behind my eyes. I blinked hard and took a deep breath, trying not to let my face betray my thoughts. Dammit, I was already giving her up as a graveyard stuffer. What else did they want from me? What else could I possibly do? 

The pain dissipated, leaving me numb and alone in my head, and I opened my eyes. Lovelace was looking at me, her head tilted quizzically. “Headache again?” Her eyebrows were drawn together in concern.

I exhaled slowly through my nose. “Yeah. They’ve been hurting less, though.” 

Lovelace nodded. “Yeah. The training does that.” 

She looked like she knew what she was talking about, but Lovelace always looked like she knew what she was talking about. The important thing was that her confidence raised another question in my mind, one that I hadn’t asked. “How did you break out? Of the…” I reached up and tapped my temple, indicating. “The brain thing?” Cutter would want to know information before he started in on Lovelace. Cutter would want this information in particular, if he wasn’t able to break her. Or if he had to call in-- 

The rest of that thought cut out before it could finish, and I shuffled a half-step back in surprise. I had always tried not to think of the other boss if I could help it, but I had never been stopped cold from thinking about  _ her  _ before. Was it not just some mindless program in my brain? Was she actively listening? 

Lovelace was talking, and I came out of my disturbing reverie to tune into her words. “...was just lucky. The rest of my crew got the full makeover, thanks to  _ Selberg _ .” Her voice, when she talked about whoever Selberg was-- or had been-- was venomous.  “He was our doctor, a willing Goddard employee trying to use a retrovirus to deliver the programming into our minds. We were early on, anyways. First gen, second gen of this kind of tech, so it killed every person who he… infected. One of us, Fisher, he died before the experiments started, and another one of my crew disappeared early on. Fourier. Still have no idea what happened to her. Everyone else just got destroyed, one by one. And I watched and wondered why this was happening to us until it was just him and me left, which is when it finally got through my thick fucking skull.” She swallowed hard, but didn’t look away from me. “I didn’t break out, I just never had it in my brain to begin with.”

“And… what did you do to Selberg?” I thought I already knew, but I needed to hear it from her. God knows why, but I needed to hear what she did to the last person who betrayed her. Someone she trusted, who destroyed her. Exactly like I was going to.

Lovelace took a deep breath and I prepared for her to say she killed him, because that’s what she was. That’s what she would do to me, and it’d make it easier to know. But instead she shifted uncomfortably and hugged her arms to herself like she was cold, pulling her body inwards. It was the only time I’d ever seen her try to make herself smaller; normally Lovelace was so unapologetic about taking up space in the world. 

When she spoke, it was quieter and sadder than I had expected. “I knocked him out and got the hell out of Dodge before anyone could stop me. I wish I could say I turned around and shot him right between the god damned eyes, but that’s not true, Minkowski.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, screwing up her face. Then she opened her eyes and looked directly at me. “I ran.” 

_ Fuck. _

There was a long pause as I tried to think of something to say just so it wouldn’t be silent and I wouldn’t feel like she was looking into my brain so much, but all I came up with was “I’m sorry.” I cringed at my own awkwardness, but Lovelace didn’t comment on it, just nodded.

“It was a long time ago. I won’t make that mistake this time.” Lovelace’s body posture relaxed and she reached out for my hand, but didn’t take it. Instead she stroked the veins under my skin with light fingertips for a moment, drawing warm patterns on the back of my hand that sent a tingling feeling up my entire arm, and it took a few seconds before my senses came back enough for me to pull away from her touch. One corner of her mouth quirked up at that, and then she turned and began to walk back out of the alley, heading out into the pale sunlight. I cursed under my breath and followed her with quick steps. 

I had to stop letting this woman touch me.

* * *

 

I let myself into the Goddard main office building at six, as planned. I didn’t have scheduled hours there; most of my time was spent in the field as an agent, but after or during a job I was expected to file reports, so being there wouldn’t be suspicious. That was Lovelace’s reasoning, at least. Mine was simpler: Cutter already knew what I was doing, so being conspicuous didn’t exactly matter. I could have done whatever I wanted. In a way that was a relief. Hiding things from Lovelace may have hurt, but it was a hell of a lot less nerve-wracking and dangerous than hiding from Goddard.

I walked up the flight of steps to the gleaming front of the building and pushed through the glass doors into the lobby. It was beautiful, all marble and bright metal and a decorative fountain in front of the elevators, but there was something ever so slightly off about it that I hadn’t even noticed until they had ensnared me totally in their net. Something about how the light glinted off the gleaming chrome fixtures and scattered around the room made it look like the building wasn’t quite there, like the room I was looking at was a step back and two steps to the side of the reality outside it. Distorted, almost. Like if I reached out and tried to touch the walls my hands would go through.

I shook my head to get rid of the feeling, then swiped my card in the security gate, punched in my code, and waited for it to beep before passing through--no reason to hurry and get 50,000 volts pumped through my body by the failsafe protocols. The light turned green and I walked through and headed down the hallway to the left, as per the instructions Lovelace had given me. I’d been down that hallway before-- as far as I had known until Lovelace talked to me it was just full of hired paperwork lackeys and ink guzzlers, the people who did the accounting and the office work for Goddard. There weren’t any of them here now, though. The offices I passed were as empty as a killer’s heart, which would have been suspicious to me if I hadn’t known that Cutter had cleared them all out beforehand to make it easier on me to get Lovelace in. I walked through the quiet corridor, turning right, left, and right again. Then… a door I had never seen before in the middle of the wall of a corridor I’d walked through a million times. 

I headed towards it with slow, cautious steps, and then stopped in front of it. The dark wood of the door was out of place with the stone walls of the corridor, and it was strangely distorted, like I was seeing it through a heat haze. Lovelace had warned me about this; she had said the conditioning can physically hide things from sight or memory if necessary. She had assumed that I’d be able to see it now that I had “broken out”, but I wasn’t sure. More of Cutter’s work, probably. 

The more I considered how this was going with Goddard’s help versus how it might have gone without their invisible hand guiding me, the more my guilt dissolved into relief that I might actually live through this. 

I reached out to the door’s dark bronze handle and turned it slowly. It opened with a strange hiss, and slipped I through, closing it behind me. 

The room beyond the door was all metal, polished and shining and perfectly clean. There was nothing in it but a row of inactive computer terminals on one side and a row of file cabinets on the other, but there was another door set into the opposite wall. This one was white and silver and smooth like everything else around it, modern and sterile in comparison to the outside one.

I checked my watch.  _ 6:15 _ . Lovelace should be in position by now, which meant… it was time. I walked over to the door and paused before opening it. This was it. This was  _ it _ . I’d open the door, and she would come in, and it would be all over. No more moral dilemmas, no more pain, no more fear or guilt. 

No more Captain Lovelace.

My throats clenched involuntarily at that thought, and for a moment I felt the absurd urge to cry before I cut the feeling off at the roots.  _ She had it coming, Lieutenant. No one can run for that long. _ I swallowed, then put my hand on the handle and opened the door.

It didn’t open to the outside, like I had for some reason thought it would. Instead it opened into a corridor, almost a tunnel above ground, dimly-lit in comparison to the stark fluorescence of the room I was in. And leaning against the opposite wall was Lovelace, changed out of her bloodied clothes from earlier and into clean ones. She looked up at me and squinted into the light for a moment, then smiled and shoved herself off towards me. “Minkowski, you did it.” Before I could stop her, she wrapped her arms around me in a hug, clutching me tight as the door shut behind her. “It’s almost over.” When she pulled back to look at me her face was radiant, triumphant.

Her expression didn’t hurt me this time; all the guilt had drained, and I was almost empty. But for a split-second she was beautiful enough and I pitied her enough to make me lean in and press my mouth to hers, despite the eyes I knew were watching. One last taste of her, me taking something to remember her by. My kiss of death. 

I pulled back, avoiding her dark eyes, and looked up into the corner of the room. “Now.”

The door burst open, and reflected in the mirror-surface metal of the door I saw Cutter walk in, flanked by two men with stares even blanker than my own and enough weaponry between them to take out an elephant. Lovelace’s eyes widened when she saw him and she tried to pull away, but my hands locked around her, holding her immobile against me. She turned her head to look at me, struggling, her eyebrows drawn together in confusion. “You?”

“Me.” My voice sounded dull and strange in my ears, like it came from somewhere else, but I didn’t flinch from her gaze even as I trapped her struggling form. I didn't even flinch when she drew back and spat in my face. I felt her saliva slide coldly down my cheek as she spoke.

“Traitor,” Lovelace said. She wasn’t yelling. She wasn’t even speaking loudly. She just said it, her voice venomous. “You’re such a god damned traitor.”

I didn’t answer, but Cutter did. “Oh, Isabel, she would have been one either way. Don’t you see? Traitor to me, traitor to you.” He tutted quietly. “You got so sloppy in your desperation.” I watched his reflection walk towards us, the two heavily-armed men spreading out to either side of Lovelace and I as he did. 

Lovelace tried to wrench away from me, to throw me down, but I lifted a knee up and into her gut and the breath  _ whoosh _ ed out of her and took the fight with it. Her eyes, when she looked at me, were pleading. “Minkowski,” she whispered. “Please."

_ Minkowski’s not here right now, is she, Lieutenant? Leave a message at the beep. _

Cutter moved around behind Lovelace and looked at me, his smile grotesquely wide, an expression of almost wild glee that didn't fit his pinstripe suit and neatly combed back hair. “Renee, you can let go of her.” I heard the words, but didn’t register for a moment, not until he raised his eyebrows pointedly at me. “Now, please.” 

I understood that time and obeyed, letting go of her arms and shoving her back from me. She stumbled, then turned around and drew back a fist to hit Cutter in the face, but the punch never landed; one of the men stepped forwards with something like a taser and jabbed her neatly with it, right in the ribs. Lovelace jerked and spasmed for a moment, then fell to the floor, limp, her eyes half-open. 

I looked at her sprawled form for a second, wondering vaguely if she had died-- but no, I could see her breathing, her chest rising and falling slowly like she was just asleep. The stillness looked strange on her face. That’s what had been wrong when she had been feigning death in the alley, I realized, the lack of that deathly... not peace, exactly, but emptiness. Lovelace had been right when she had said dead people didn’t look like they were sleeping, but there was something missing from them along with the life. Something visible. She had never managed to quite lose it when she was awake. 

I filed the information away for future use. Maybe a job would demand knowledge like that from me one day. 

Cutter gestured to the men to pick up Lovelace from the ground, and they lifted her form up and over their shoulders like she was a nothing but a body and held her in the air. Her limbs hung loose from her frame, her hair a curled halo around her face. The light made her look sickly. Unnatural. I kept coming back to that word. She looked unnatural. This was unnatural. 

I didn’t even realize that I had been staring at her until Cutter waved his hand in front of my face, breaking my gaze. “Yoo-hoo, Renee! Are you awake in there?” 

I blinked hard, then shifted my gaze away from Lovelace and onto his face with difficulty. “Yes, sir. I can hear you, sir.”  _ Even if you can barely register what he’s saying.  _ It took all my effort to keep my eyes trained on him and not look back to Lovelace.

Cutter nodded, his face adopting a false expression of patriarchal concern. “You know, you look exhausted. Maybe you should go home, check in tomorrow. We can talk! We can talk, specifically, about… well, about you and Isabel here.” He gestured to Lovelace’s body, still smiling.

My voice sounded flat and toneless and I knew I could change it if I tried, but I didn’t want to. All I wanted was the answer to one question. “Are you going to fire me, sir?”

His eyebrows and voice both shot up, and I winced as he got louder with his incredulity. “What? No, no! Why would we do that when you’ve done so well? No, I just thought you might be getting a little… lonely, shall we say?” Cutter wiggled his eyebrows, and I felt a faint twinge of nausea. “I mean, what with your display with the captain here. Maybe we should get you a partner. Would you like that?”

_ No. _ I looked away from his face. “I don’t know, sir.” 

“Well, think about it. Meet me in my office at 8 sharp tomorrow! I can promise that by then everything will have been taken care of.” He turned to the men carrying Lovelace. “Now let’s go, boys.” 

They walked out, leaving me alone in a gleaming room of files and computer banks, where I could have done anything. Cutter was so confident I wouldn’t have the will to do anything that for a moment my fingers itched to destroy the computers, shove the file cabinets over, break into them for something useful. I left instead. He was right; there wasn’t enough fight left in me to try.

* * *

 

It was raining when I left Goddard, drops of water slicking the sidewalk and turning the roads into shining reflections of the street lamps and billboards and neon advertising lights. I welcomed the cold wetness on my skin, the ice-cold water that fucked up my hair and my clothes and made me shiver like my body was being covered in frost. It reminded me that there  _ was _ a body keeping me tethered to earth here, rather than me being a floating mind somewhere else with nothing but a window into hell. It made me feel more real. But my auto-pilot was still on, and when I opened my car door and got in that feeling of-- of  _ feeling,  _ of having any sort of sensation at all, of having something to hold onto-- disappeared. 

The clock on my dashboard blinked in glowing green numerals.  _ 6:45 pm.  _

I drove with a lead foot to get home, for no other reason than the need to be away from Goddard for a while, away from people, away from Cutter and away from what he was doing to Lovelace. I wanted to be alone, to rest, and to prepare for whatever was going to come in the morning when Cutter decided that I needed a partner in my life and in my work like I was some kind of pet. He might have been right; Lovelace had left a hole in me, and I missed her warmth. Maybe someone else could fill it. 

I pulled up to my apartment building, parked, and walked up to my home, keeping my focus on taking the steps one at a time. I tried to count them, but got lost before fifteen. Then I just tried to put one foot in front of the other until I reached my front door. 

I leaned down to unlock it and heard her voice, very quietly.  _ I’m just really good at picking locks.  _ Was it only this morning she had said that to me? It felt like a lifetime ago. I pushed the thought out of my mind, opened the door, and stepped into my apartment, closing it behind me. 

It shouldn’t have surprised me that the apartment was empty, but it did anyways.

I flicked on the light and glanced around, taking in the dinginess of my living space like I was seeing it for the first time, and something in the back of my head muttered dully that I really should clean it up. Pick things up, make it presentable for- who?  _ No one is coming to visit, Lieutenant. _ I shook my head to clear it, headed down the hall, opened the door to my room, and stopped dead.

In a crumpled pile on the ground were my clothes from last night, with her jacket sitting on top of them. 

The shape of it seemed to fill my vision as the rest of the room spun around me, and I fell to my knees with a  _ thunk _ and a shock of pain, jarring my spine and head. I reached out and grabbed it, the leather of it cool and worn under my fingers. Carefully I pulled it towards me, into my lap, and lifted it up to bury my face in it. It still smelled like her. 

For the first time since I started working for Goddard I let myself cry, loud and shaking sobs that threatened to break my chest. I cried into Lovelace’s jacket and my tears slid off it, not soaking in. The guilt, the regret, the  _ loss  _ of it all, the sheer force of my betrayal to her, all of it hit me at once.  _ Lovelace, Lovelace, what have I done? What the hell did I just give you up for? I’m-- _ it took effort to think this past the pressure in my head and the mental stoppers, it did, but I forced the words out of my mind anyways--  _ I’m sorry. I’m sorry!  _

The dam inside my head cracked and broke, and I couldn’t think anymore through how much it hurt. It hurt like my skull was cracking open, like something awful and slimy and new was hatching, like my brain was tearing itself apart. The force of it knocked me over onto the floor and the world shook and spasmed around me, colors washing in and out as I screamed and screamed and screamed until I didn’t have any more breath to scream. Then the tide of pain ebbed away, leaving me sweating and gasping for air on the floor of my apartment, my hands clenched into tight fists around Lovelace’s jacket, my cheek pressed to the ground, tears and mucus running down my face, and a million bruises and scrapes and aching muscles that I hadn’t felt before telling me that the world around me was  _ there.  _

I felt alive. 

I lay there for a second panting, then stood shakily, using the doorframe to haul myself to my feet. I was still holding onto Lovelace’s leather jacket in my other hand, and I shoved myself upright and shrugged it on, pulling it over my shoulders to let it envelop me. I knew what to do. I knew what had to be done, and I was finally clearheaded enough that I could do it. 

I checked my holster to see if I had my gun,  then turned to walk out. My cheeks hurt, and I realized that despite everything I was smiling so wide it felt like it would crack my face in two. I was back. I had busted out. And now? I checked my watch in the doorway.  _ 7:15 _ . Less than twelve hours and forty-five minutes to get her back, and the clock was ticking. Then I left, my feet pounding on the steps as I took them two at a time all the way down.

Now I needed information.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies, but there will be no new chapter this week and possibly for a while. December is really hectic already with finals week, plus I have other commitments as well. I absolutely intend to finish this fic and I have it planned out in my mind, but the regular update schedule I had may have been more of an anomaly. Thank you all for your kind words and kudos.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I DID IT. I UPDATED. HOLY F U C K

20 minutes later I slammed open the door to the emptiness of the early-evening Hephaestus, making Hera jump behind the counter and almost fumble the glass she was handling. As I turned and shut the door against the cold, she set the glass down on the sideboard gently, then turned and started to yell at me in that odd, glitched-out stutter of hers. “Lieutenant Minkowski, what the  _ fuck _ is going on here?  _ What did you do to Lovelace? _ ” 

Her tone was angry but her face was contorted into an expression of concern, and I winced slightly.  _ This is going to be harder than I thought. _ I walked over as smoothly as I could and sat on one of bar stools, trying to ignore how my stomach was flip-flopping with nerves. “They have her,” I said, and Hera’s face went pale. I leaned forwards across the counter, towards her. “I need your help.”

“My  _ help? _ Oh, no no no. No, no, not a  _ chance.” _ Hera started looking around fast, as if something or someone was already coming for her. “If they have Lovelace they’ll know about me soon, if they haven’t gotten it out of her already. I’m out of here, Minkowski, and you should be too.” Hera started to move, but I reached out and grabbed her arm, holding her still. She tried to wrench my hand off, but I held her tight. 

“You can be gone as soon as you’d like, Hera, but first I need you to tell me all the dirt you’ve got on Goddard.” I leaned in closer, pulling her towards me. “I’m going in to finish what Lovelace started.” 

Hera’s eyes were wild, darting left and right, never resting on my face. “You’ll die. Or they’ll capture you, and you’ll wish you  _ could _ die.” 

“You thought Lovelace could bring them down.” I scowled at her, baring my teeth. “Tell. Me.”

Hera’s hand came out of nowhere, the heel of her palm smashing into my nose like a hammer. Stars blotted out my vision, and I left go of her arm, the momentum carrying me backwards and off the bar stool to crash on the Hephaestus’s floorboards. It knocked the breath out of me with a  _ whoosh _ , and I lay there for a moment, gasping. Hot blood flowed from the ball of pain that was my nose down over my face, dripping onto the floor. I groaned. 

I heard the tapping of shoes on wood, and Hera’s feet, in low-heeled boots, appeared in my vision. Then a hand came down and tilted my head up to look at her expression, which was more sober than any face in a bar had a right to be. “I thought Lovelace could do it,” she said, “because Lovelace had never gone through the training. Because they’d never fucked with her mind beyond the good old-fashioned trauma. But you? You’ve been eating out of Goddard’s palm for years. What guarantees your programming isn’t going to take over once you’re there?” Her voice went quiet. “It would for me.”

I couldn’t tell her what had happened. I couldn’t tell her that it had, that I was the reason Lovelace was under Cutter’s thumb. She wouldn’t have let me explain-- I knew that as soon as the words left my mouth she’d stomp me down like a bug. So instead I swallowed hard and spoke, my voice nasal and hoarse. “It won’t. I swear to you. It won’t.” 

Hera was silent for a moment, then let go of me abruptly. I wasn’t ready, and my head hit the ground again with a  _ thunk _ . I made a pained noise, but she ignored me. “You can say that now, Lieutenant, but you have no idea what might happen.” I heard her take a breath, then exhale slowly. “They know about me already, if they have Lovelace. They have more information from her than anything you can give them. So, go. But I’m not going with you.” There was a jingle, and then a set of keys dropped onto the floor next to my head with a noise that made me wince. “Those are the keys to the back. I keep a file cabinet in here, with everything I’ve found and everything I know. Figure it out yourself.” Then she turned, and I heard her footsteps beginning to move away. 

I dragged myself up slowly into a sitting position with the help of the bar, grabbing the keys. Just as Hera finished shrugging her coat on and reached the door, I called out. “Hey!” She turned, her handle on the doorknob, and I swallowed hard. “Why is Goddard looking for you so hard? What’s so special about you that Cutter wants you back?”

Hera snorted. “Cutter? Cutter doesn’t want me back.” She opened the door to the cold and began to walk out, giving me one last glance over her shoulder. “Pryce does.”

The door of the Hephaestus swung shut behind her.

Goosebumps stood up on my skin, but they had nothing to do with temperature.  _ Pryce _ . Well, at least I knew what reason Hera had for being so desperate to run. I only ever heard rumors about the people who became Pryce’s playthings, and none of them were good. The woman herself I had seen only once, but that had been enough. Even thinking about her eyes sent another chill down my spine and a wave of paranoia through me. I had been afraid, earlier, that she was watching me. Apparently that feeling didn’t come from the conditioning.

I pushed thoughts of her out of my mind with a shudder and grabbed the bar, then hauled myself up to a standing position despite the floating stars that drifted in front of my eyes. When I felt like I wasn't going to topple over immediately, I let go of the countertop and straightened up, swaying slightly but not falling. My nose throbbed, and I tasted the iron of blood on my tongue and winced. Hera had a hell of a swing on her, unluckily for me. I reached up and prodded it with my free hand, which hurt like a bitch, but it didn’t feel broken.  _ Good.  _ I couldn’t afford too many injuries right now. 

I looked up and saw the clock hanging on the opposite wall, above one of the tables.  _ 7:53 _ . The countdown was still on. I glanced down at the ring of keys I held, then at the door to the back room, hidden away in the dimness behind the bar.  _ Time for me to get cracking. _


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Managed to get this one out before Wolf 359 ends!!!! Holy fuck........... I'm....... hfdsjhsfsdjksdfj. Merry Christmas!!! Probably about 2 more chapters left, if I had to guess.

Four hours and thirteen minutes later I walked up the steps of the Goddard Futuristics office for the second time that day, fighting deja vu as my feet moved up the rain-slicked stairs and the building towered over me. I shoved open the door again and went through the same movements of swiping my card and waiting for the green light, just like earlier in the afternoon, but whereas then I had been blank and listless now my mind was on fire. I licked my lips and shifted my bag from shoulder to shoulder as I waited for the go-ahead, then headed forwards when the light blipped green. But instead of turning down the hallway with the cubicles and offices and all-white computer room hiding behind an old wooden door I walked straight across the polished floor of the lobby to the elevators and pressed the button to go up, and then I waited.

It had taken me a while to find the file cabinet among the junk in Hera’s back room, but find it I had, tucked away between a bookshelf full of various editions of _Pryce and Carter’s Desperate Situation Survival, Procedure, and Protocol Manual_ and a broken grandfather clock. Some of the files inside had been old, printed on yellowed paper with water stains and blotched ink, but others were crisp and new, and I had looked at the schematics and the plans and the observations and combined them with my knowledge to figure out what I had to do. Which started with--

The _ding_ of the elevator startled me back into reality. I glanced into the mirrored interior for a moment before determining there was no one inside, then got in, pressed the button for the thirtieth floor, and crossed my fingers to pray that I wouldn’t encounter anyone else on the ride up. _Please, please, please_ …

The numbers ticked upwards slowly, one floor to the next, and just as I was beginning to think that maybe the building would be mostly empty at this time of night and I wouldn’t need to deal with the strain of lying to people my ascent slowed. I groaned internally as the elevator stopped on the 17th floor and prepared myself silently as the doors slid open, but I wasn’t prepared enough, because Warren Kepler got in.

Colonel Kepler was an agent, same as me, three years my senior at the company and fifteen years my senior in patronizing bullshit. He was the ultimate sleaze, the kind of man who thought he knew more than anyone else possibly could, and his arrogant condescension combined with his Southern drawl slowed his voice down to an almost glacial pace. It was one of the things that made him infuriatingly irritating to work with. The one time I had been on assignment with him I had been ready to knock him out and finish the job myself by the end of day one, and the only thing that kept me from doing just that was the threat of the boss’s disapproval. I pitied his team, but not as much as I pitied myself now for having to share space with the man.

He was competent, behind all the layers of awful. Certainly competent enough to entangle me in my own lies if he had the chance. I just had to keep it simple.

He got in the elevator, reached past me, and pushed the button to close the door, along with the button for the 35th floor. I cursed silently as the elevator doors slid shut, then stared straight ahead, refusing to look at him or even at his reflection. Maybe, just maybe, if I stayed silent he wouldn’t--

Kepler hummed quietly and adjusted his cuffs, then turned to me with a painted-on smile. “Well, hello there, Lieutenant Minkowski. I thought you had the rest of the night off? What with capturing the notorious Captain Lovelace and all. Don’t tell me they’re making you come back to file a report?”

I gave him a thin-lipped smile that hid clenched teeth, wishing I could get out of these close quarters with him. I could practically feel his eyes on me as he noted my beat-up face, the blood on the collar of my shirt, the distinctly not regulation leather jacket, the bag slung over my shoulder. It felt like having something awful crawl across my skin. “No, bosses let me off early. Couldn’t sleep, though. I’m heading in to floor 30 to try and check out where my next assignment might be.” The thirtieth floor was where Goddard kept the “missions board”, a big map showing all the active locations where we had agents and places where we might soon need them. It had nothing to do with my reasons for being there, but it made for good cover.

“Aren’t you eager _._ Can’t wait to get back into the field, even after all the… _trouble_ you’ve just had to deal with.” The inflection in his voice told me that he knew at least some of what had gone on with Lovelace, and that made my stomach clench in fear and anger. I had to fight to keep my fists from clenching along with it.

I took a deep breath and managed to keep my voice level as I spoke. I looked him in the eye. “I just want to get back to work. Besides, she wasn’t any trouble in the end.”

“So I’ve heard.” Kepler chuckled, and I wished to god that I could just pull my gun out and put a bullet through his skull. But the elevator slowed to a stop again and brought me out of my bloody reverie. I glanced up at the panel displaying numbers-- 30.

“Well, this is where I get off. See you around, Colonel.” I pushed the “door open” button and stepped out, starting to walk down the hallway beyond the doors. Behind me, Kepler called out, his voice tinged with amusement that set my nerves on edge.

“Good luck with your new assignment, Lieutenant.” I didn’t turn around to look as the doors slid closed, and I didn’t let myself relax until I heard the elevator start up again, carrying Kepler up and away to wherever the hell he was going. _Good riddance._

I headed down the hallway, past the room with the assignment map, past the makeshift medical center, then turned left, heading down a hall that as far as I had known before only had the bathrooms and a fire exit. But the map I had found of the building’s newest design, tucked away in the folders, had shown another room here, a bigger one. One that I hadn’t seen before, which meant it had been hidden, erased from my eyes just like so much else.

I walked down the hall and saw another door set into the wall. It looked totally ordinary, just like any other office door, except for the fact that I had never seen it before. The plaque that sat next to it designated it as “Room 359”. I swallowed hard.

_Here we go._

This door, unlike the one at ground level, did have something special; a retina scanner. Hera’s files had shown some of the plans for it, all written in mechanical gibberish I didn’t understand. What I did know was two things, though:

One, the scanner was programmed to accept either Pryce or Cutter’s retina scans.

Two, I knew how to bypass that without getting them there.

Hera had written, in her notes, that she didn’t know how to get past the scanner with traditional hacking. I had no idea what Lovelace had planned to do in that case-- break down the door? Kidnap one of the bosses and use their eyes?-- but luckily for me, I didn’t need to resort to desperate measures. I’d seen something similar before, in a job in Beijing a few years back that had involved more than a little entering of the kind that was usually preceded by “breaking and”. There had been a retina scanner then, as well.

I shrugged my bag off of my shoulders and unzipped it, then pulled out a large folder that I had repurposed from Hera’s file cabinet after dumping all the papers it had held out.

A high-quality photo of a person can be used to bypass most retina scanners, especially if their eyes are clear. That’s how I had gotten past the other one; quick online search, a nice, printed photo of the target, and I was through. But Cutter and Pryce kept low profiles, which made that route almost impossible. Somehow they’d managed to keep the web free of most pictures of them, and the ones that did exist (of Cutter, mostly) weren’t of a good enough quality to be usable. It didn’t matter, though, because even though Hera hadn’t known at the time, what she needed was in the back room of the Hephaestus all along.

I reached into the folder and carefully pulled out the old photograph of Cutter that had been sitting on top of one of the shelves, being very careful not to damage it. Even in the fluorescent light of the building’s hallway his eyes seemed alive, and I shuddered. Then I turned the photo around and held it up to the camera, positioning its eye in front of the scanner. The scanner clicked and hummed, and I waited, trying to calm the part of me that was screaming that this was taking too long and I needed to go, _now!_ I held the photo and steadied myself, and eventually the scanner gave a final _ding_ and stopped.

“Authorization recognized,” it said, in a crisp, female voice. “Welcome, Marcus Cutter.”

The door swung open on its own, moving smoothly on well-balanced hinges, and I let out a breath that I hadn’t known I was holding. I put the picture back into its folder and shoved that back into my bag, then entered Room 359.

It was a room full of whirring mechanical equipment, wires and blinking lights and a bank of computers and servers all along one wall, with a tiny version of a radio tower transmitter rising up past the back of a monitor. There was a workbench on the other side, with tools laid out along it, tiny screwdrivers and wires and needles and little circuit boards and chips. Mechanics, electronics, computer components and parts, everything needed to reprogram electronics and people. Hera’s notes hadn’t said what was behind the door to Room 359, only that we knew the controls for every single one of Goddard’s agents must have been set up in it. Now I knew why.

I was in Pryce’s lab.

I didn’t have a plan for this part. Lovelace might have had one, but she hadn’t written it down; she hadn’t known I would betray her before she got to finish bringing Goddard to its knees. I felt guilt grab my heart and squeeze and winced, closing my eyes and shutting down the memory of the look on her face when she had found out. I didn’t have a plan for this part, no. All I knew was what I was going to do afterwards.

I looked around at the tools and tables scattered around me, then grabbed a wrench that was lying nearby and swung it like a baseball bat into the transmitter, knocking it over. The shock radiated up my arms as the noise it made hit my ears like a fastball. I started hitting the computers, bashing them _hard_ , breaking the screen of the monitor and battering the cases, doing my level best to destroy as many things as I could. At some point an alarm started to go off and I knew I had to go even faster, so I reached into my bag and pulled out wire clippers, then started to cut every wire I could find. The lights that hadn’t already gone dark on the terminals did, and I was left in a room full of battered electronic equipment and sparking wires, with an alarm ringing in my ears and-- and _footsteps,_ coming down the hallway. I hadn’t been fast enough, shit. I slammed the door to the room shut and shoved some of the heavier equipment in front of it, then turned and looked around the room. If the other notes had been right, then-- there. The grille to a vent, high up on the wall behind the workbench. I grabbed a screwdriver from the bench and then swept all the rest of the tools off of it, scattering them to the floor with a metallic clattering. I could hear yelling coming from outside the door, and I swallowed hard. I climbed up onto the table and began unscrewing the grille to the vent, going as fast as I possibly could. Sweat plastered my hair to my forehead and stung as it dripped into my eyes, but I didn’t dare let go to wipe it away. I had finished unscrewing the first two screws when there was a _bang_ that could be heard even above the alarm and something hit the door, hard. I jumped despite myself and barely avoided falling. _Two more, just two more…_ My palms were slick with sweat, but the last two screws finally came out, and I pulled the grille out and tossed my bag into the air duct, then climbed in after it, squeezing my body into the narrow gap. I wished, belatedly, that I had some way to fit the grille back over the opening, but that didn’t look possible. All I could do now was crawl away as fast as possible, which I did, ignoring the pain in my knees as they banged against the metal of the duct. _Go, go, go, go, go!_

The noises of people trying to break into Room 359 faded as I crawled away, dragging my bag with me. I took a turn around a corner and then stopped, breathing heavily. Phase one of the plan was done. I had destroyed, or at least majorly fucked up, the remote controls for most Goddard employes. Phase two, though… I checked my watch. _12:41 am._ The countdown had stopped having meaning as soon as I entered the building, but I still needed to move fast, as fast as I possibly could, especially because the alarm had just cut off. Lovelace was still here, and they wouldn’t be distracted for long.

Some part of me wondered what Lovelace would do, even if I was successful in saving her. Would she understand? Or would she never want to see me again? I swallowed and squeezed my eyes shut, pushing an image of Lovelace telling me in her low, cold voice that she wanted nothing to do with me out of my mind. _It’d be worth it,_ I thought. _Even if she hated me. It’d be worth it._

I took a deep breath and opened my eyes, then switched my train of thought to trying to remember the next part of the plan. _It said three turns to the right, didn’t it?_ Which meant that the turn up ahead was the one, if I wasn’t mistaken. I grunted slightly, then resumed moving, crawling to the right and to what at first appeared to be a dead end. The duct, at the end of the small corridor, turned up and away from me, heading to the next floor and disappearing into darkness. No way I could crawl up there, but I didn’t need to. Just before the turn there was another grille, and I wriggled my way towards it and shoved on it. It didn’t budge. I swallowed down my panic and tried again, bracing my back against the side of the duct and kicking out with all my might. My feet slammed into the grate and it popped out and fell with a clatter into the room beyond. After a moment I followed it, slipping into the room feet-first and falling with absolutely no cat-like grace onto the floor below the vent. I sprawled on the dust-covered greyness of the concrete for a moment and groaned quietly. “Ow.” _Fuck, that hurt._

I carefully pushed myself to my feet, ignoring the dull ache of my bruises and the pain in my face radiating outwards from my nose, and turned around to surveil the room around me. It was strangely utilitarian in contrast to the rest of the Goddard offices, all cobwebs and concrete and sparse benches. In the shadows of the corners lurked a few strange machines, looming like monsters turned to stone, and there were still some beakers lined up on the tables, filled with strange residue. It smelled like mold and age, with a faint, sharp tinge of formaldehyde. I coughed, then pulled my shirt up to cover my mouth. _Gross._

It was no secret that the Goddard building had gone through a major renovation years before my time-- you can’t bring construction equipment to a skyscraper without turning a few heads, after all-- but until I had checked the cost records and the plans that Hera and Lovelace had left behind I hadn’t known that some of the rooms were still there, under the new facade of marble and shining metal, unused and more importantly unsurveilled. This was one of them. Apparently it had been some kind of lab, before everything. _Pryce’s?_ I decided I didn’t particularly want to know. No matter what it had been before, now it was nothing but a means to an end.

I turned and headed towards the back of the room, shoving one of the pieces of equipment away from the wall with a screech that set my teeth on edge. Behind it was a doorway, and a long-faded sign that proclaimed that this was a stairwell. I took a deep breath and opened it, then went in and started my descent.

Five stories down and three rooms to the right was the room I wanted. I’d been there before; I’d _used_ it before, when a prisoner was being recalcitrant, when I needed the information so badly I’d been willing to carve it out of someone’s skin. Not enjoyable, just business at the time. My stomach bubbled uncomfortably at the memory, and I moved faster down the steps, letting the rhythmic thumping of my boots take me away from the memories.

I suspected there were going to be a lot of memories from Goddard that I wasn’t proud of from now on. Maybe through the rest of my life, though considering what I was doing that didn’t mean much.

I kept my feet moving, pushing myself down the stairs even as my body begged me to give up. I couldn’t listen to the aches right now, to the stitch in my side or my gasping for breath through a stinging windpipe. There just wasn’t _time._ But I reached the bottom of the fifth flight and had to stop for a moment, doubled up and clutching the guardrail on the stairs. _Fuck!_ I was pushing myself too hard, stepping on the accelerator when my body’s gas tank was on empty, and I hadn’t even gotten to the hardest part yet. After a moment I managed to get myself up and keep going, but I could feel it in my ribs, in how my eyelids drooped despite the adrenaline running through my veins.

I was running low on energy and time.

I pushed open the door of the forgotten stairwell into another dust-covered room, this one with something like a dentist’s chair sitting in the middle. I didn’t pause to take it in, just kept moving. Out the door, down the hallway, the last sprint-- _please please please god let Cutter be anywhere but there_ …

I slammed open the door to Goddard’s officially sanctioned torture room to see Lovelace, bound to a chair in the middle of it, bleeding from the mouth. Her face was bruised and swollen, and long, shallow, parallel cuts ran across her arms and the sides of her face. I could see some of the fingers on her right hand twisted and broken, the nails missing-- torn off, probably. Chunks of her curly hair were missing, too, leaving parts of her scalp bald. Electrodes were plastered on those parts, with a clear gel. Her skin was ashen.

Despite myself, my heart leapt when I saw her, beating even faster. Despite myself, I was glad that it wasn’t worse. I’d seen how people were broken in that room. Lovelace was getting off lightly.

Lovelace’s brown eyes widened when she saw me, and she blinked quickly, like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She licked her lips and swallowed hard, and I watched her face contort as she tried to speak. “Minkowski?” Her voice was hoarse, raw and rasping and painful to hear, and I shut the door behind myself and hurried over to her.

“Shh,” I said, kneeling down on the floor next to her. I reached out and started pulling the electrodes from her head, then undoing the ties that held her to the chair, fumbling with them. “I’m here, I’m here, we’re going to go…”

Lovelace looked at me blearily, then shook her head slowly. “I thought you had… I thought you were going to leave me.”

My heart wrenched, and I felt tears coming into my eyes and my voice. “Never. _Never_ again.” I freed her right hand, then started working on her left. “I am never, _ever_ going to leave you again, do you hear me?”

“Yes,” said Lovelace, quietly. Her eyes seemed brighter now, more clear, more focused.

I didn’t pause in unfastening her, didn’t pause to answer. I moved over and wrapped my arms around her, helping her up from her chair to face the door. She hissed in pain, and I winced. “Sorry, sorry. It’s just until I get you out of here--”

“I’m fine, Minkowski.” But she didn’t push me away.

“Come on. We’re almost out of here. We’re _so close,_ Lovelace.” I glanced at her face, but she wasn’t looking at me anymore.

There was the soft sound of the door being opened and closed, and then the _click_ of a gun. I looked away from her, then at the door and the woman standing there, pointing a small pistol directly at my center of mass. She looked at me and blinked, and I saw her eyes crackle with static for just a moment.

Miranda Pryce gave me a thin-lipped smile. “So close,” she said, in a voice that was a reflection of Hera’s in a twisted mirror, “but so, _so_ far.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: the retina scanner picture hack actually works! Here's a link: https://thehackernews.com/2015/03/iris-biometric-security-bypass.html. Also, as of 1/2/2018, chapter 11 is in the works. It might not be done until after January 10th, though; I'm on winter break and my family is doing a lot of stuff, which doesn't leave me a ton of writing time.


	11. Chapter 11

"You can’t be here.” As soon as the words left my mouth I winced at my stupidity, but Pryce just cocked her head to the right.   
  
“And yet I am here, Lieutenant Minkowski. There’s… well. There’s very little that I can’t do.” As she looked at me, Pryce’s eyes clicked and whirred. I could see her pupils expanding, and got the impression that she was, somehow, zooming in on me. There was the chill of judgement in the curve of her mouth now. “Although I’m not very happy that you destroyed my lab.”   
  
Lovelace made a choking noise, and I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. “You got into the lab?”   
  
“Oh, yes,” Pryce responded, with the kind of calm in her voice that only comes from being on the right end of the gun. “She took my toys apart quite thoroughly. It was somewhat impressive, if messy. We lost control of many people from the top down, including some here. Marcus is dealing with them at the moment.” Pryce smiled a bit broader, and spiders crawled down my spine. “You’ve picked a smart woman to love, captain.” 

My eyes widened, but I didn’t have time to process the words. Her gun was still aimed at my heart, her hands steady as she pointed it. I wondered if I could cross the gap before she could shoot—but that would mean letting go of Lovelace, who still wasn’t strong enough to stand on her own, let alone dodge bullets and run away if I failed. If I died, she’d go too. The difference is that I might be lucky enough to have it be quick. 

Pryce continued. “You’ve both been a real thorn in Goddard’s side—”    
  
“Oh, would you just quit it already?” Lovelace sounded aggrieved, and she ignored the alarmed look I shot her. “Kill us! Torture us! Do something! Don’t just stand there making threats!”   
  
“Lovelace…” I started to warn her, but she didn’t listen.    
  
“You know,” she said, “I think it’s hilarious. You could have won ages ago if you weren’t so god damned full of yourselves. You almost killed me, but you failed because you underestimated how much I didn’t want to die. You had Minkowski here totally under control, but you lost it because you underestimated how determined she was. Hell, you could have stopped this situation entirely if you had just for once stopped to see the world as what it was instead of what you thought it should be. Instead, you’ve lost control over how many of your agents? Hundreds? Thousands? All because you think you’re always going to be the smartest people in any room, and you haven’t even realized that you’re wrong.” Lovelace stopped talking, panting for air. The blood from her cuts stained my—her—jacket, soaking into the leather, ruining it. A shame, for such a nice jacket.  _ Why am I even thinking about this? It’ll all be the same in a little bit.. _   
  
Pryce stood there for a moment, waiting to see if Lovelace had anything else to say, but all that came out of Lovelace’s mouth were ragged, gasping breaths. I wished more than anything I could get her out of there, pick her up in my arms and run and never stop, but that seemed impossible now. Pryce laughed. “You’re very eager to get back in that chair, Captain Isabel Sofia Lovelace.” She drew out the name in her mouth, and beside me Lovelace made a rasping noise that sounded like she wanted to interrupt but couldn’t get the words out. “You’re right, of course. We will be taking more precautions from now on. But rest assured, I am the smartest person in this room right now, and if you ever assume that just because I or my colleagues are self-assured or overconfident or arrogant we are vulnerable, I will be more than delighted to teach you how wrong you are.” Pryce blinked slowly. “I’m sure you understand.”

Lovelace took a deep, rattling breath, and then raised the arm not draped around me for support and curled her fingers painfully, leaving the middle one up. “All I understand,” she said, voice guttural and full of pain, “is that you’re a grade-A douchebag.”

Pryce paused, her eyes slipping languidly back to Lovelace for a moment. Then she shook her head slightly and went back to looking at me. “I can see we’re not going to get anywhere there. Lieutenant Minkowski, tell me, how did you break out of the conditioning?” 

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Why do you want to know?”

“So whatever went wrong with you won’t happen again.” Pryce made a tutting noise. “Make no mistake, Minkowski, you haven’t destroyed us. This isn’t the first time someone has tried to weaken Goddard. Tell me. You have nothing to lose.” Her voice was utterly calm, utterly convicted, and I knew that either she was telling the truth or she had convinced herself that this was the truth. I can’t say I wasn’t tempted to tell her what happened. In the face of that conviction I felt like a pebble on the beach going up against a tsunami, an unbreakable wall of water.  _ There’s no way we’re surviving this.  _

Lovelace’s grip on me tightened, and I saw her watching me out of the corner of my eye, staring up at me. I swallowed hard and made my decision. “Go to hell.”

“Hm. Disappointing.” Pryce looked at me for a moment. “Well, we’ll see it eventually anyways. Warren?”

“Yes, doctor?” said a Southern accent, and I groaned internally. Lovelace stiffened as Kepler pushed open the door wider, moving to stand in the doorway beside Pryce. The mask of joviality had dropped from his face and his voice, and I felt a brief twinge of fear at seeing the loss of his facade. “How do you want me to deal with these two?” 

Pryce jerked her chin towards me. “Restrain Lieutenant Minkowski.” 

Kepler’s lip twitched into a microsecond expression of disgust, and I focused on that rather than on the order Pryce had just given.  _ Some bug’s crawled up his ass after all.  _ “Yes, doctor. And Captain Lovelace?” 

Lovelace opened her mouth to protest, but Pryce was already speaking. “What about her?” She shifted the gun to point to Lovelace’s chest instead of mine. “Do as you’re told, colonel.” 

A bitter taste flooded my mouth, like leftover vomit, as Kepler moved out from beside Pryce and began to walk over to me. Lovelace pressed closer to me, and I held her tighter to myself as he stepped closer. I clenched my free fist and prepared for what I would do once he grabbed me.  _ I could hit him, probably. Get a good swing in before… before Pryce shoots Lovelace.  _ I tried frantically to think of something better in the half-second before he reached us, but Lovelace interrupted my train of thought. She whispered, just loud enough for me to hear, “Inside pocket,” and the lightbulb in my head flicked on. 

I dropped Lovelace, untangling my arm from her body, and she fell to the floor with a sickening  _ thump  _ that was immediately masked by the ear-bursting noise of Pryce’s gun going off into the empty space where she had just been. While my ears were still ringing Kepler lunged forwards and grabbed my arm, and with my other hand I reached inside Lovelace’s jacket to the fabric lining. 

When you think about fights, it’s important to know that the showy fights you see in movies don’t happen. No acrobatics, nothing flashy or glamorous. The real ones are quick and brutal and dirty, over in seconds. The most important thing you can do in those fights is strike fast and strike well. 

I was counting on that.

Kepler pulled me closer, and I pulled the knife out of the jacket and stabbed him just under the ribcage. He yelled and let go, stumbling backwards off of the knife with a sickening sucking noise. Red seeped through his shirt like some sort of macabre ink. He didn’t clutch the wound like I had expected; instead he grabbed desperately for me and punched me in the throat, and my vision broke like a mirror, shattering into fragments as I choked on a ball of pain. I collapsed, and he went down with me, hitting the floor enough to knock any breath that might have been in me before out. I gasped, trying to draw in oxygen, but there wasn’t enough time to fully recover before Kepler pinned my hand holding the knife to the ground. His eyes, as he drew back his other fist to hit me again, were wide and wild, the irises surrounded by white. My pain-addled mind latched onto their color, breaking the picture down to one piece at a time. 

_ Grey eyes.  _

The punch came down, and I jerked my other arm up, catching the blow on the meat of my forearm. It hurt, but it spread the pain out further and duller and gave me the time I needed. I used it to bring my leg up and drive my foot into his stomach, kicking him as hard as I could in the same place I had stabbed him. His mouth opened in an O of surprise and pain, and he fell backwards, toppling off me. I shoved myself up and kicked out at his body. I connected, the tip of my boot caught him beneath the jaw, and his head snapped back. He went limp.

There was a  _ click  _ as Pryce, behind me, cocked her gun again, and I whirled around to see her aiming the gun at me again, ignoring Lovelace on the ground. Her eyes crackled, static filling them even as the rest of her face was blank and impassive, and I dropped the knife and threw myself to the side, knowing as I dove away that she wouldn’t miss. The gun went off again, a  _ bang _ that shattered the world, and I hit the floor for the second time. Pain ripped through me like claws through flesh, making me convulse. 

There was a thudding noise, light like a flashbulb popped in my eyes, and everything was silent except for my and Lovelace’s labored breathing and the sound of footsteps. 

_ I guess this is how I die, then. We were so close.  _

Then Lovelace, ten feet away on the floor, started to laugh in a wheezy, quiet chuckle. 

“You,” she said. 

“Me,” said Pryce, in a quieter voice than I expected from someone who had just won a battle. Her footsteps stopped next to me, and a hand reached down and brushed my hair back from my face. I couldn’t move through the pain, but I managed to and glance up at her. 

I was met by a familiar pair of strange, light amber eyes, framed by dark eyebrows. One of them quirked up when she saw me looking. 

“Lieutenant Minkowski, stop being such a drama queen and get up. She didn’t even shoot you,” said Hera. 

She reached down and helped me up, pulling me to my feet with one hand. In the other she held an old-fashioned police nightstick, a heavy black baton that looked like it could do serious damage. I staggered but managed to stay upright after she let go. Looking around the room, I saw Pryce, collapsed by the door with blood clotting around the side of her head, where Hera had apparently hit her. “Damn,” I said, quietly. 

“I know,” said Hera. She looked worse for wear too; she was favoring one leg slightly, and there was blood splattered across her shirt in a spray of scarlet. When she saw me looking, she shrugged. “Most of it isn’t mine.” 

I furrowed my brow. “I thought you were going to run. Wasn’t that what you were talking about earlier?”

She shook her head. “No. Well, yes. I was going to, but… you actually did it. You got the equipment torn down. I felt the conditioning dissipate, and…”

“And you wanted a part of the action,” Lovelace chimed in. She had propped herself up slightly on her unbroken left hand, and was watching us. She looked like fifty miles of bad road, bruised and bloodied like she was, but her eyes were alert. My heart twinged when I looked at her, even in that state. 

Hera tipped her head to the side, then shrugged. “I guess you could put it that way. Hang on, captain.” She headed over to Lovelace to try pulling her up too, but Lovelace made an uncomfortable noise as Hera struggled to lift her, and she released her abruptly. “Sorry, sorry.” Hera turned and looked at me. “A little help here?” 

“I’m  _ fine,”  _ Lovelace protested, glaring at Hera, but I rolled my eyes and headed over anyways. Lovelace switched the glare to me and I ignored her, sliding my arms around her and lifting. She shut her eyes tight as I helped her to her feet, taking deep, controlled breaths. Sweat mingled with the blood on her skin and lines appeared between her eyebrows as her facial muscles tightened, despite her struggling not to show the pain. I winced in sympathy. When I finally had her up, she opened her eyes slightly, looking at me through a squint. “Okay,” she said, through gritted teeth. “I’m okay. I’m okay. You can let go, Minkowski.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Are you  _ sure _ about that, captain? Because you really don’t seem like you’re in any shape to try and stand. You weren’t before.” 

“Yes, but now we’re not being attacked and I won’t get shot if I move wrong.” Her words had the sharp edge of annoyance, and I pressed my lips together in a line, raising an eyebrow at her. Lovelace exhaled through her nose. “At least let me try.” 

I opened my mouth to tell her that there was no way in hell I’d be doing that, closed it when I saw the look in her eyes, and opened it again. “Damn it all. Alright, Lovelace, fine. Let’s see you walk.” With slow, careful movements, I moved away from supporting her and left her standing on her own. She swayed, but didn’t fall. 

Lovelace gave me an exhausted smile. “See? Told you so.” Despite how hoarse she was, she sounded almost like she had earlier, sitting in my apartment and teasing me about my taste in literature. Even like this, she was so beautiful. I couldn’t help but smile back.

Hera cleared her throat. “Uh, sorry to interrupt your moment, but Pryce and whoever this other guy is,” she gestured to Kepler, “are both still breathing, so you’d better either kill them or get out of here  _ fast. _ ” 

I looked at Kepler, in a pool of his own blood, and Pryce, unconscious and helpless, and I considered killing them. It would have been easy. My knife-- Lovelace’s knife-- was on the floor just a few feet away, after all. A couple of quick slices, sprays of blood, and safety. It was efficient, quick, guaranteed.

It was exactly what Goddard had taught me to do. 

I shook my head. “Let them lie there. He’s probably going to die anyways, and she doesn’t look like she’ll be waking up for a while. First priority is us getting out alive.”

“Agreed,” said Lovelace. “We need to get moving.” 

Hera nodded once, then turned, holding the door open for us. “Both of you, go.” She jerked her head towards the corridor. “I met a few non-controlled employees on the way up, but I cleared them out for you. Other than that, I think your path is pretty much clear. This building’s like a ghost town.”

My mind flashed back to what Pryce had said about Cutter and everyone in the building they had lost control of.  _ Marcus is dealing with them at the moment.  _ My spine felt like it was trying to grow legs and climb out of my back, but I took a deep breath and shoved the feeling down.  _ If he’s dealing with them, he doesn’t have time to mess with us. _ “Good.” 

I walked out the door into the hallway, stepping over the unconscious Pryce, and Lovelace followed, grimacing. She stopped in the doorway, turning to face Hera and leaning on the frame. “You coming?”

A smile like I had never seen from her spread across Hera’s face, her eyes lighting up. “No. After all,” she said, looking down at Pryce’s prone body, “I have something to talk to her about.” The smile faded as she glanced back up. “ _Go._ My car’s in the parking garage. Here.” She reached into her pocket and tossed me a set of keys, which I managed to catch before they hit me in the face. “Don’t stop driving until daylight.”

She didn’t have to say it twice. Lovelace reached out and took my hand, and we didn’t look back.

* * *

 

Hera’s car was painted a nondescript grey, just like a dozen or more other cars in the parking garage. I had never seen it before and had no idea what to look for, but Lovelace did, and she led me to it, both of us limping our way over as fast as we possibly could. I could feel the exhaustion of the night taking hold of me as the adrenaline drained, trying to force my eyes closed despite all of the pain. Lovelace looked similarly fatigued.

When we reached the car, I fumbled the keys into the lock of the driver’s side door and opened it. I was about ready to get in when Lovelace stopped me, letting go of my hand to put her palm on my shoulder. “I want to.” 

I looked down at her other hand, at the broken and twisted pinky and ring fingers, at the still-seeping cuts on both arms, and then back up at her face dubiously. I shook my head. “Tell me why on earth I would let you do that.”

“Because driving would hurt you, and I’m-” She shook her head. “I’m done watching you hurt on my behalf.”

“But-” I began to protest, but she plucked the keys from my hand and slid into the driver’s seat without stopping. 

“Besides,” she continued, with an expression that could only be called a smirk, “I just want to show off my one-handed driving skills.” 

I considered telling her to get out and let me, but it would have been useless. The woman was as stubborn as an entire team of mules, and I already had trouble saying no to her. Instead I wrinkled my nose and moved around to the other side of the car, muttering. “Stupid, unbudging, injured, unfairly pretty, refusing-to-argue-with-me revolutionary.” I sat in the passenger’s seat and closed the door behind me, wincing as the movement made pain shoot through my body. 

“Aww, you think I’m pretty? That’s sweet.” Lovelace turned the engine on and began to move out of the parking spot, somehow maneuvering one-handed to bring us out. She was about to move the car from reverse into drive when I saw something in the side-view mirror, a flicker of movement. 

“Get down!” I shoved myself towards the floor of the car, pulling Lovelace down to duck in time for a bullet to punch a hole through the back windshield, her headrest and the other windshield in front of it. Cutter, walking up behind us, readied his gun to shoot again, and Lovelace cursed. She reached out, grabbing the gearshift and pulling it to “drive”, then hit the gas, bringing her hand up to the wheel and pulling hard. The car swung in a tight curve, spinning like a figure skater, and Cutter missed his shot again, the  _ bang _ of the gun echoing off the concrete of the garage. 

I couldn’t hear his next words, but I saw his lips moving. He talked even as he correct aim for his next shot, and I could see the same smile playing across his lips as always. I hated that fucking smile. I hated that fucking man.

Lovelace swerved as Cutter fired, and the bullet hit one of the side-view mirrors, destroying it. She wasn’t distracted; she pulled the car back again, until I could see him through the windshield, directly in front of us. His eyes widened as he realized what Lovelace was about to do and he started to move, but he wasn’t fast enough. Lovelace slammed her foot down and the car plowed into him, flinging him up and over it with his limbs flailing like a ragdoll’s. I saw his limp form in the rear-view mirror, and then Lovelace turned the corner, tearing out of the parking garage as fast as she could go. She didn’t slow down until she got to the street. 

Lovelace pulled out onto the road and headed down towards the highway out of the city, driving far more carefully than expected for someone who just commited intentional vehicular murder. For some reason that thought made me laugh, breaking the stunned silence. Lovelace gave me a concerned glance,and I shook my head, giggles forcing their way out of me. “You… you hit him… with a  _ car _ ,” I managed to get out between laughs, and after a second she started laughing, too. 

“I sure as  _ fuck  _ did, Minkowski!”

* * *

 

How we weren’t pulled over on the drive even with the bullet holes and missing mirror is a mystery to me even now, but we weren’t and we made it out of the city eventually, driving until we reached a motel that looked like the kind of no-questions-asked place we needed. I got out first and opened the door for Lovelace, and she directed me to the first-aid kit in the back. Getting it out was a hassle, but eventually I managed it, and we staggered into the motel right as the sky was starting to lighten. 

For the second time in two days I didn’t remember much else through the haze, but whereas before it had been the drunkenness, that morning it was pain and fatigue clouding my mind. Despite that I did remember a few things-- check-in, how we dragged ourselves into the filthy bathroom, treated each others’ wounds as best we could. One memory was especially crystal-clear to me; I stood up after everything and pulled Lovelace with me, guiding her over to the bed and collapsing, pulling her down to lie next to me. She wrapped her arms around me, and without a thought I pressed my lips to hers, just briefly. She tasted like blood and salt, but I was too tired to care. 

I fell asleep almost immediately afterwards, not alone for the first time in far too many years. 

 


	12. Chapter 12

I woke up sweat-covered and panting in darkness, with something tangling up my limbs and weighing me down. I kicked out at it, shoving it away as hard as I could, and--

\--there was a gasp, a  _ thump _ , and a sudden burst of cold as Lovelace fell out of the bed and took the covers with her. 

Right. That’s where I was. Fuck.

Looking around now, the motel room wasn’t as dark as I had thought; there was a mid-afternoon gloom that blanketed most of the room, but it wasn’t the pitch-black my panicked and sleep-addled mind had thought it was. I took a deep breath to try and slow my breathing down and moved to peer down over the edge of the bed at Lovelace, who was sprawled on the floor, looking dazed. “Sorry about that.”

“Ow,” she said, then repeated again with more emphasis. “ _ Owww. _ Jesus, Minkowski, is this how you treat everyone you wake up next to?”

“I…” I trailed off. I didn’t know what to say.  _ “Actually, captain, I haven’t woken up next to anyone in a very long time and I thought you were some kind of diabolical restraint”? _ I settled for shaking my head. “I was having a nightmare. That’s all.” Not technically untrue-- I didn’t remember what I had been dreaming about, but with my history I doubted that it was sunshine and rainbows.

Lovelace’s gaze softened. “Oh,” she said, a whole universe of understanding in that syllable. She took a deep breath and turned, shoving herself up into a sitting position with stiff and painful movements. “Don’t apologize. It happens to the best of us.” She paused, hesitation written in the crease of her brow. “Do you… want to talk about it?”

I shook my head again. “Thanks for the offer, but I’ll pass.” I reached down and offered her my hand, ignoring the sting of strained muscles in my own body. “Look, let’s just go back to sleep. God knows we need it.”

Lovelace put a hand up and stopped me. She looked around, taking in the dingy motel room and the dimness of dusk that was rapidly fading to night, and sighed. “Minkowski, as much as I love that idea, we need to get going.” She reached up and grabbed the nightstand, hauling herself up with a groan, and flicked the lamp on to bathe the room in a thin, yellow light. I sat up and squinted at her, blinking to try and clear my eyes. She looked like hell, but the bandages over her cuts and the splinting on her hand had held, and the swelling from her bruises seemed to have gone down slightly. She crossed her arms over her chest, tapping her foot impatiently.  _ “Now.” _

I scowled at her, but knew she was right. Cutter was dead and Pryce was at least temporarily out of commission, but Goddard was a huge corporation, and what we had done was less like cutting the head off a snake and more like cutting an earthworm in half. There was the chance that it would die, but it could also split into two or more equally-devastating, independent entities. We weren’t safe yet. 

My shoulders slumped. “Fine.” I swung my legs out of bed and stood in front of Lovelace, cracking my neck. “Let’s go,” I said, quietly, but neither of us made an attempt to move. 

In the haze of adrenaline and pain and exhaustion of before I hadn’t felt it, but being near her was still electrifying. 

My eyes flicked down to her lips without consulting my brain and she leaned in and kissed me, her mouth soft and gentle on mine, her hands moving down as she brushed her fingertips lightly over the skin below the hem of my shirt, just above the waistband of my pants. For a second we stayed like that, a contrast to the hungry, desperate messiness of all the other times. Then she pulled away, resting her forehead on mine and looking into my eyes with her deep brown ones. “Later,” she whispered. She lifted herself up onto tiptoes and kissed my forehead, then moved away, taking a step back. “When we’re safe.”

The look in her eyes was so soft and so warm, and Pryce’s words from yesterday came back to me.  _ You’ve picked a smart woman to love, captain, _ she had said. 

_ Does Lovelace love me? Do I love her?  _

I took a deep breath and nodded, more to clear my head than to acknowledge her words. “Safe,” I said, the word tasting strange in my mouth. “Yeah.”

* * *

 

We stole a car.

We couldn’t keep going in Hera’s; it was far too conspicuous with how beat-up it was, and it wasn’t in the best of shape anyways. I debated with Lovelace about buying one used, but it couldn’t work-- we had some money, but after the motel neither of us could pay a few thousand dollars without credit, and that would be easily trackable. We were too beat up for public transportation, and it wouldn’t take us where we wanted to go, which was as close to nowhere as anyone could get. So the next chance we got we pulled over into a department-store parking lot and waited for an easy target. I ended up in the driver’s seat of a white Honda Accord that had been left running while its owner ran in to the store, pulling out onto the interstate and heading away from the city. I drove until nightfall as Lovelace dozed in the passenger seat, then further, finally stopping around midnight at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere to rest. Lovelace jerked awake when the car rolled to a halt, looking around in confusion. “What? Where are we? What happened?”

I shook my head, bringing my hands up off the wheel into a placating position. “Nothing. I just need to stop driving for a while and rest, and this seemed like as good a place as any.”

Lovelace looked at me, then sighed. “You could always let me drive, you know.”

I rolled my eyes. “No. You already know I’m going to say that. And…” my chest tightened, and I took a deep breath, wrapping my hands in the hem of my shirt to steady them. “I had something I wanted to ask you.”

She raised an eyebrow, but I saw the muscles in her throat move as she swallowed. “Ask away.”

I was so tense I was shaking, and I couldn’t figure out why. Fear? Anticipation? Excitement?  _ Fuck it, fuck it, fuck this.  _ “Do you love me?” Lovelace’s face froze, and I continued, my words going out of control like a shopping cart down a steep hill. “I-- Pryce said something, yesterday, and I know she was trying to psyche us out but I need to know. I need to  _ know.” _

Lovelace opened her mouth, shut it again, and scrubbed her hand across her face, pushing hair out of her eyes. “I… Minkowski, I don’t know. The shit she did to me was…” She squeezed her eyes shut, then tilted her head down, indicating the bald spots where her hair had been shaved to place electrodes. “They dug my memories out of my skull,” she said, and my chest tightened in sympathy. “And they saw everything. How I feel about you. I think she thought that was love,” Lovelace continued, her voice low. “But her mind’s twisted and seven different kinds of fucked up, and I don’t know if anyone can trust that kind of worldview. All I know is that I care about you so much. You’re remarkable, Minkowski, and you’re so fucking beautiful, and...” She trailed up and looked back to me, her eyes wide and filled with the kind of futile hope that’s so common in people that can already see in their minds their own defeat. My heart was beating fast enough to explode as she took another breath, filling her lungs like she was about to duck beneath the water and she didn’t know when she’d come up again. “I want to know you well enough to love you. Properly.”

My entire body flooded with heat, and I reached out and covered her hand with mine. “You will.”

* * *

 

I drove to the next big city I could find, with us stealing cars every so often, as much as we needed them. It almost made me laugh to think that if we ever did get caught for a crime it’d be for serial motor vehicle theft; the idea was so ridiculous, especially considering the mountains of other shit we’d been involved with over the years. We ate at diners and gas stations and we slept at truck stops and by the sides of roads and we talked about the things that mattered now and had mattered before. I told her about the years before Goddard, when all I had wanted to do was write about love and pain and beauty and sorrow, and she told me about her dreams of the court and the thrill of the game and of how those were ruined in a swift and shattering instant. We both cried sometimes, because talking about all of it hurt like hell, but it hurt in the way that pulling off a dirt-encrusted band-aid hurt-- like we’d heal quicker for it afterwards. We laughed, too. More times than I’d laughed in years. I kissed her. She kissed me. 

She told me she loved me, tentatively at first, and then many times after that.

I told her I loved her back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it's done. Thank you for all your support over these past few months, I couldn't have done it without you. (Also, fun fact about the name! The fic was actually named after the song "Sucker Punch" by Die Mannequin. It's a wildly straight song that doesn't fit the story at all, but it sure was a jam, and I used it as a working title and then got attached. Go listen to it!)


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